About Us
Code Red is a group dedicated to providing menstrual supplies to women* experiencing homelessness or poverty. These women often face the choice between a meal or sanitary products. By providing these products, we can help reduce the stress of dealing with a period and provide people with access to the hygiene that everyone deserves.
We create and distribute care packages with products to last 1-2 cycles. These packages are then distributed on midnight runs and to homeless shelters. We work with our school and community in order to help those in need. Together, we can lessen the great burden that falls on women when they experience their period without access to products. No one should be denied the right to a safe and sanitary period and it is our duty to ensure this.
How We Started
In 2018, six of us were in the same Social Studies class where we were assigned a project. We needed to do research on a law that we wanted to change. Our focus was on the “Tampon Tax” which lists feminine hygiene supplies as a luxury item, allowing them to be taxed. As we were working on our project, we learned more about how this law prevented many women from buying necessary, not luxury, products. The idea that many impoverished, homeless women have to choose between a meal and menstrual supplies, both which are equally important, had not been something that we had learned about prior. Thus began the brainstorming of how we could help women access the products they needed. After much discussion, we concluded that our mission was to distribute care packages with enough supplies to last one menstrual cycle. To help personalize the packages, we decided to use reusable makeup bags to hold the supplies and include a handwritten note in each. The name we decided on at the time was Period Monster which has since been changed to Code Red.