Bonny Rollender is the owner of Rytualist Aesthetic Bar in Portland. Angela Stone is the
founder and executive director at Maine Needs, a southern Maine nonprofit providing essential goods to individuals and families in need.
Somewhere in Maine right now, a woman is doing quiet math that no one should have to do — weighing the cost of menstrual products against rent, groceries, a utility bill that’s already overdue. She is one of the 1-in-4 women and girls in Maine who cannot afford basic menstrual hygiene products.
Menstrual health has long been the kind of topic we’ve been taught to handle delicately, briefly or not at all. The result is that a very real, very local problem stays invisible, and the people living with it are left to navigate it alone.
Angela Stone and Heather Tracy at Maine Needs see the need in requests for basic items. “The unmentionables” of pads, tampons, menstrual cups and, frankly, a week’s worth of underwear are needed by most women. At Maine Needs, they’ve learned that sometimes clients aren’t comfortable talking with their caseworker about these items, and that, much like diapers and toilet paper, menstrual products aren’t always available in food banks and pantries.
Bonnie Rollender sees it through her work at Rytualist, a small business built around wellness and self-care. The question that work keeps raising: who takes care of the women who can’t afford the basics? A pad. A tampon or menstrual cup. A clean pair of underwear. Period poverty doesn’t belong to someone else’s community or somewhere else in the state. It affects the person in line at the grocery store and the teenager sitting next to your child in school.
When someone can’t afford menstrual products, they improvise. They miss work. They miss school. They manage as best they can and carry the added weight of shame on top of the financial burden. That is what we mean when we say period poverty is a dignity issue, and given how rarely it surfaces in public conversation, a silence issue.
This spring, southern Maine businesses and organizations are coming together to collect menstrual hygiene products for women and girls in need, and to spark a broader conversation about period poverty in our state.
Rytualist Aesthetics Bar, HOTWORX, EA Fitness & Performance, Portland Women’s Social Circle, Nonesuch River Brewing, Botanically Curious, Orange Bike Brewing, Poland Provisions and Maine Needs have set up collection points for donated products — tampons, pads, menstrual cups and liners — which will be distributed through Maine Needs across the region.
This campaign is not a comprehensive solution to poverty, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Maine made meaningful progress when Gov. Mills signed legislation in 2021 that exempted menstrual products from the state sales tax, but a tax exemption doesn’t put products in the hands of those who can’t afford them.
Policy and community action both matter. Period poverty is real in Maine. We’re done pretending otherwise. We’re asking Maine to lean into a conversation it has too often avoided. Say the word “period” without lowering your voice. Understand that when someone misses school or work because they cannot manage their period, that is a community problem, and community problems have community solutions.
The most immediate solution is straightforward: drop off tampons, menstrual cups or pads at any partner location. If you own a business and want to add a collection point, contact Bonnie at Rytualist. If you want to volunteer or contribute financially, Maine Needs’ doors are open. And if the only thing you can do is share this piece, it matters more than you might think.
If you’re not near a collection point, call your local food pantry or school and ask if they accept regular menstrual product donations. Many will say yes, and a monthly box of pads, given consistently, does more over time than any single drive.
Maine has never been a state that waits for someone else to solve a problem. When people
here see a need, they find a way to meet it. Every product donated goes directly to someone who needs it. That’s not a small thing.