Community Hours’ efforts to end period poverty, for good

Community Hours brings women together in an aim to fight period poverty and to give women their power back.

Community Hours is a Parktown-based brand built on creating and curating volunteering opportunities for volunteers. Many young schoolgoing learners are required by the IEB to provide a portfolio of evidence of social engagement as part of their matric life orientation (LO) submission.

Finding age-appropriate and engaging volunteering opportunities can prove to be challenging for both the learners and their parents, and given the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown, ever more exasperating to explore. Community Hours is an online platform which forms a conduit between youth who both need and want to volunteer, and organisations such non-profit organisations (NPOs), non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as well as faith based organisations which welcome the efforts, skills and time committed to by the volunteers.

The project held its most recent volunteering event at EQ-FIN in Bryanston on August 21. At the event, 35 volunteers were set a task of sorting and repackaging and labelling donated feminine hygiene products. With a seemingly impossible mountain to climb the volunteers, in a three-hour window, ended the event having repackaged an astonishing 34 980 individual units of feminine hygiene products which included sanitary towels, panty liners and tampons. The impact of this activity is not only measured in its quantified outcome, but in the collaboration of 35 volunteers from 14 different schools.

The volunteers worked tirelessly side by side to package hygiene products and kindness for girls from under-resourced schools who will be gifted the products. This will ensure that they do not have to miss school because they are having their periods, and to women who, due to the economic circumstances they find themselves in, would not have access to hygiene products.

“Community Hours strives to inspire volunteers to see community service as a positive engagement, to find something that they love doing and something which resonates with them, to grow a sense of community commitment and to enhance active citizenship among the youth to secure sustainable and meaningful social commitment into adulthood,” said Sarah Welton-Blake, chief innovations officer for Community Hours.

Should schools like to find out about the programme and the data management tools it offers to support reporting and assessment of community engagement of their learners, they are most welcome to contact sarah@communityhours.co.za for more information.

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