Kwek Society Corp

Meet the need. We at The Kwek Society are focused on supplying Indigenous students and their school peers the period products they need to stay in school, maintain their good health and celebrate their strength and moon times (what many Indigenous people in North American call their period). We collaborate with schools and student-focused programs in rural areas, suburbs, and cities across the United States to eliminate period poverty. We educate about moon time as a time for celebration, and we work to support the dignity and strength of all we serve.

Period supplies available at no cost in all school, government and public bathrooms, alongside the toilet paper and soap!

Goal One: Expand our distribution of pads, tampons and other period supplies, along with puberty education materials, through new partnerships with schools serving Native students

Goal Two: Secure partnerships with community-based organizations and Native Nations who can provide funding so we can reach more Native students and their peers at risk for period poverty

Goal Three: Draw increased attention to the inequities facing Native American youth and communities, including menstrual inequity, and highlight and celebrate the successes of indigenous North Americans

We are exceedingly small (all volunteer except for a paid college intern) but we understand the need to develop our volunteers, including our board members. This summer we were able to advocate for a scholarship from UbyKotex so that our newest board member, our treasurer, could attend the 2021 Poverty and Basic Needs Conference hosted by the National Diaper Bank and the Alliance for Period Supplies. We were excited to provide our treasurer this opportunity at the start of her service to our organization.

In mid-March 2020 Covid-19 shut down all the schools we support, but our distributions did not stop. Many of our schools (located in New Mexico, South Dakota and Wyoming) continued to support students through food distributions and brought our supplies to the distribution sites. We resupplied those schools through the spring. We also began distributions to Navajo families through our contact with the Navajo Nation government and included masks sewn by our donors in some of those shipments. We built on our relationship with a global organization focused on ending period poverty, Days for Girls International, and facilitated DFGI’s distribution of thousands more masks to the Navajo Nation. As a result, The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development in mid-June 2020 identified us as one of a number of indigenous women-run groups doing “critical and courageous work” to assist Native communities and Native nations during the pandemic. In the last quarter of 2020, we arranged for more mask shipments from The March of Dimes, Americans for Native Americans and The JJ Metta Memorial Foundation, and received more cloth mask donations from many community sewists. This allowed us to supply our partners with 10,756 COVID masks through 2020. Unfortunately many of our schools and other community partners did not return to in-person operations during 2021. Accordingly, we updated our message to our partners urging them to take our supplies and distribute them to as many community members as possible. As a result, in 2021 we have been able to reach family members (parents, cousins, aunts, siblings) with needed period supplies, not only school students or individual clinic patients. As a result, in 2021 we distributed almost as many supplies as we did since our 2018 inception. We continue to message our readiness for new partners, and continue to fill the supply needs of those operating in-person.