Simply the Basics, November's Reverence Fund Partner
Dear Rosies,
Two in five people have gone without something as simple as menstrual care at some point in their life. Not abroad, not in theory — here, now, in schools and shelters and neighborhoods a few miles from wherever you're reading this.
Meghan Freebeck saw the shape of it first at a suicide prevention center, where she kept hearing the same thing underneath the crisis: people couldn't get free of it because they couldn't even get clean. No soap, no pads, no clean clothes to put on for a job interview. So she started Simply the Basics, built on a simple read of Maslow's hierarchy of needs — you cannot reach for anything higher until the basics are covered.
A decade on, that's a national network of schools, shelters, and disaster-response partners receiving hygiene kits, and more than 100,000 face masks delivered during the pandemic alone. One in five children miss school over something as preventable as a lack of hygiene care. A family displaced by fire or flood loses everything but the clothes on their back. Simply the Basics meets people at that exact gap, over and over, city by city.
In November, every order sends a portion to Simply the Basics. Anything you add at checkout passes through in full.
We know this terrain in our own way. Our work is reverence for the body that's already yours — the intimate skin, the one you don't always get taught to tend. Theirs is the floor underneath that: the soap, the pad, the clean washcloth that makes any of the rest of it possible. Our Refresh wipes live in that same small, essential category — a clean cloth when you need one, nothing more complicated than that. You can't get to self-care without the basics first.
Inner change, outer systems. Both, always.
Give directly to Simply the Basics.
To the fullness of this precious life in a body,
Christine Marie Mason, Founder, Rosebud Woman
Related Articles
