The name has been in place from the beginning, and it gets attention: Team Tampon. “At first, it was a joke, but then we just liked it and decided, yep, we’re Team Tampon,” Perry Steph, a Tascosa High School senior, says. She and three friends make up the Team. “It gets pretty funny sometimes. We have to tell teachers, ‘Hey, I’m with Team Tampon. Do you need anything?’ But yeah, it just stuck.”
Steph is the leader of Team Tampon, a subcommittee in the Friends In Service of Hunger Club at THS. For several years, the group has provided food items for students who experience food insecurity.
“We don’t get any credit or any grade; it’s just volunteer,” Steph says. “It makes me feel so fulfilled that people are getting what they need. We’re ensuring every student has the opportunity to feel comfortable.”
Through donation collection efforts, the group expanded its offerings to include essential hygiene items, as well. “They noticed there was a problem that girls did not have enough feminine products for their needs throughout the school year,” Steph shares. “So they started putting products in the bathrooms.”
Today, the program has evolved and allows students who need hygiene items like soap, shampoo, conditioner, tampons, pads, toothpaste and deodorant to request them from teachers at THS. These anonymous orders are filled by FISH Club members and distributed throughout the year until supplies run out. Steph says more than 200 girls responded to a recent survey indicating they have used the service at some point in their high school careers.
“In the survey, we asked how many times you have not come to school because you don’t have [period products], and it was like some girls were saying three days or four days,” Steph says. “They don’t come to school because they don’t have anything! They can’t just go to school and learn. It’s insane.”
Women of the Tent
Period poverty, or the lack of access to safe menstrual products and sanitary facilities, is a global health issue, and the United States is not immune. According to a 2023 survey commissioned by Thinx Inc. and the nonprofit group PERIOD., almost a quarter of teens and one-third of adults struggle to afford period products. In the same survey, 44 percent of teens report stress and embarrassment due to a lack of access to period products. The same study, however, indicates that strides have been made in the past few years regarding access to period products in schools. Conversations around menstrual health, education and efforts to decrease stigma around menstrual cycles are driving that change.
Meanwhile, Kay Kennedy, a member of the Beloved Community, a service group at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church that formed during the COVID-19 pandemic, started to hear about the need for period products in the area. She learned teachers at area high schools were paying out-of-pocket to supply period products for students in their classrooms.
“They’re dealing with transportation poverty, food poverty, clothing poverty; there are just so many things for them to juggle,” Kennedy says.
She knew she needed to do something about it. What’s more, she knew she could do something with the help of some of her friends at church. The Beloved Community ministry works to support justice, healing and education and has many partnerships with local nonprofit organizations, schools and city community projects. The group adopted the new initiative to provide period products. They named it Women of the Tent.
“The book that was popular in the 1990s, called The Red Tent, talked about when women were having their period or having children, they would be removed from the tribe in ancient times and taken to another place; the older women would come in and take care of them,” Kennedy explains. The Red Tent was written by Anita Diamant. “And I thought, that appeals to me. ‘Women of the Tent’ is a little cumbersome, but it seems to have worked for what we need to do. It seemed to resonate with women. ‘I want to help. I remember my time.’ I think it just naturally piqued their interest.”
The group’s grassroots fundraising and product collection grew when the Harrington Cancer and Health Foundation’s Women’s Circle and the Amarillo Area Foundation supplied grants to support those efforts. Now, Women of the Tent provides hygiene products at Sam Houston Middle School, Palo Duro High School, Caprock High School, and to Steph’s FISH Club at Tascosa High School. During the 2023-24 academic year, the organization supplied 1,262 pads, 1,542 tampons, 862 bars of soap and
186 deodorants.
“I’ve been brought to tears at the number of girls who say, ‘You don’t know how much this means to me—how much this has helped,’” Steph says. “On the surveys given to students who use the shampoo and conditioner, they say, ‘This has saved me and my siblings this week.’ They’ll use that for a whole family.”
‘You’ve Got This’
As with many projects, there have been growing pains. Finding affordable, quality products can be difficult, but Kennedy, in her third year of Women of the Tent, has gotten into a groove when it comes to buying and distribution. This fall, she’ll shift to providing only pads and tampons for the schools, and her system allows for the product to be sent directly to the campuses—alleviating the need for storage or additional distribution steps.
“We learned a lot about what we can actually accomplish, and we don’t want to have that mission creep,” Kennedy says.
Steph, meanwhile, has been faced with her own challenges.
“This year was hard because we were having trouble with discipline in the bathrooms,” she laments. “We were having kids throw stuff in the toilet and destroy products, which is frustrating in and of itself. It’s just hard to put them somewhere else because in the bathroom is the most reasonable place. Two teachers per hall have the products, but it’s hard because what kid wants to go ask a teacher for them? We’re going to try again in the bathrooms this year, but we just can’t waste money.”
Her resilience on full display, though, Steph is committed to re-educating her student colleagues about the work her organization does at THS, where the products come from and who they benefit. She says she knows that having the hygiene items available at school is a critical resource that some of her classmates desperately need.
“We use Kay Kennedy’s donations, and it’s always helpful, but we always run out of donations; when we order for a semester, it’s like $1,000 to just have enough for one semester,” she explains.
“You just don’t think about those things,” Kennedy adds. “That’s one thing the Beloved Community is doing. We’re trying to really look and go down deep and find something we could really do. ‘Why are we sitting here? This we can take care of.’”
With the help of the community, Kennedy hopes to expand Women of the Tent in the coming months. In addition to grant funding, Kennedy is hopeful this year’s The Panhandle Gives will provide some much-needed financial assistance to achieve that end.
“I would like to take on at least the highest economically disadvantaged middle schools,” Kennedy says. “Eventually, it would be great if we could do all of the public schools. I think all of our programs of the Beloved Community are aimed at the Amarillo Independent School District schools—we support education, we support reading, we support health.”
Even though Steph will graduate in May, she says she wants to expand the services FISH Club provides by offering period products during the summer months. The need for food increases when school is out for the summer and she assumes the need for hygiene products is no different. Steph wants her fellow students to know they are not doing life alone; there is a whole clandestine network, of sorts, ensuring they know they are loved.
“In our bags, we’ll put a note—mostly simple things like ‘You are loved,’ ‘You are beautiful,’ ‘You’ve got this,’” Steph says. “I think especially students in that financial situation don’t hear that enough, and it takes less than five seconds for us to do that for somebody else, and it could make their whole day or whole week.”
Steph is in high school. Kennedy could almost be her grandmother. But for these two women, this work isn’t just about providing products; it’s about empathy, compassion and community. It’s women helping women. It’s multiple generations working together to deliver a profound message during what can, oftentimes, be a dreaded time of the month.
“There’s a group that cares about you and wants you to be able to finish school,” Kennedy says. “I just think that has to be the strongest message that a young girl facing all these issues can possibly hear. Some unknown person out there cares about me.”
Donate to the Beloved Community ministry through the church’s website (standrewsamarillo.org/give) or mail donations to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, 1601 S. Georgia St., Amarillo, TX 79102.
