I take my bras for granted, as do most women.
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how lucky I am to wake up
every morning and go about my day in comfort. Not every woman
has the opportunity or the access to this kind of comfortability in
her daily life. In fact, there are thousands of women in the United
S t a t e s a l o n e who are homeless and desperately in need of bras as well as
menstrual products to help enhance their human dignity and quality of life.
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Support
the Girls founder Dana Marlowe, who has been
working to distribute dignity to homeless women
around the world.
SD: Where did you find your inspiration for
starting Support the Girls?
DM: It was an accident. I never intended to start
a global NGO in my spare time. After working
out and losing weight, it was my husband who
told me that I needed new bras. In July 2015, I
went to a Soma store near me. After they fitted
me, I asked an associate if they refurbished bras
like they do laptops. I wanted to know what I
could do with all of my old bras that were still
good, but just didn’t fit me anymore. She said
that homeless women desperately needed bras.
I had never heard of this issue. I went online to
do research and I found out that it was true –
homeless women desperately needed bras, maxi
pads and tampons. All of a sudden, it dawned
on me - what it must be like for someone who
is homeless or living a transient lifestyle, what it
must be like every month to live that kind of life.
There are all of these little fortuitive moments
in life and this was one of them. I realized that
I don’t know what I don’t know. So I decided to
tell all of this, all of what I had learned to a friend
that I truly respect and when I told her about this
issue, she said she had no idea. It was in that
moment that I realized I wasn’t alone.
SD: How has social media helped grow the
movement?
DM: Learning what homeless women needed
and that I wasn’t alone was the push that I
needed. So, I made a post about it on my
Facebook page, that I would be hosting a
collection of bras and menstrual products for
two weeks. I thought, whatever, maybe some
friends would donate. But the post got reshared
and reshared. I tried to track all the threads and
replies, trying to write down the names of all the
people who wanted to donate. I realized that I
needed to make this more systematic under one
location and that location became Support The
Girls.
I created a Facebook page and hundreds of
people started signing up. On my lunch hours,
I would go around the DC area to collect bags
of bras from people’s doorsteps. Now, I get