Life Stages: 'I charged my gym clients for drinking wine to fight period poverty'
By Bianca Farmakis|
Life Stages is 9Honey's latest series that aims to find out when people made their biggest life choices and the journey there along the way.
A first period is often a notable, not to mention confronting, life stage to experience.
But between handling cramps, embarrassing situations and inevitable food cravings, over one million Australians who menstruate cannot even afford pads or tampons.
Rochelle Courtenay was working as a personal trainer in Brisbane when she came up with the idea to "charge" clients a pack of pads or tampons for every glass of wine they had.
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"I had read an article about 'period poverty' and I just couldn't turn a blind eye to it," she tells 9Honey.
"So I thought, 'If I get my clients who can't part with a glass of wine to donate one packet every time they had one, I could make a difference'."
Having accumulated more than 450 packets of pads and tampons in March 2015, Courtenay donated the sanitary items to five different charities.
It wasn't until two months later when a friend asked Courtenay, then 44, to host another sanitary item "drive" for charity that she found her calling to eradicate period poverty.
"That's when the 'drive idea' started. I started to post on a little social media page that probably only had 300 followers asking people to drop off some pads and tampons, and it went viral from there," she explains.
As Courtenay's drive gained national attention throughout 2015, she launched Share the Dignity Australia, a charity providing sanitary items for people experiencing homelessness and in times of crisis.
Expanding her service to a nation-wide audience, Courtenay would receive upwards of 200 messages every day from other charities, requesting pads and tampons to provide to people in need.
"I was messaging clients back to back from 5am until 1am most nights," she reveals.
The messages Courtenay revealed ranged from organisations seeking her services to individuals sharing their own heartbreaking anecdotes of period poverty.
A Darwin petrol store clerk in Darwin recalled seeing a woman steal pads from her store while visibly bleeding through her pants.
"The store assistant asked me what was less dignified: denying the woman access to look after herself, or charging someone in need for it?" Courtenay explains.
Another woman informed Courtenay a 14-year-old experiencing homelessness after leaving an abusive situation had resorted to stealing socks from a local laundromat in order to care for herself.
The anecdotes, Courtenay claims, have been a powerful vehicle in Share the Dignity achieving its momentum.
"When women hear these stories, they are overwhelmed with empathy," Courtenay says.
"I don't think there is a woman, or person, in Australia that wouldn't buy a packet of pads or tampons after hearing that."
With an estimated one million people experiencing period poverty in Australia, Courtenay says people often result in using "mattress foam" or other household items to care for their menstrual hygiene.
Partnering with Woolworths to provide 'donation bins' for consumers, Share the Dignity supplied more than 200,000 packets of sanitary items in 2019.
Courtenay explains this was "only enough to last 50,000 women for four months."
Though it had to be cut short early due to the pandemic, the charity's March drive still collected 60,000 packets of sanitary items. More than 163,000 products requested were from more than 1300 charities.
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"I wanted to end period poverty, but I need every person in Australia to know about it to do this," Courtney shares.
"But no one wants to talk about periods in the first place, let alone poverty."
With homelessness figures expected to rise as a result of the economic impact of coronavirus, Courtenay says her charity is "needed now more than ever" to support vulnerable people.
"We're not asking for much, $5 can go a long way for someone."
Share the Dignity's August drive will run until the end of the month, collecting sanitary items in designated bins in Woolworths supermarkets across the country and online.
