Total underwear collected is 2,198,380

Thank you for sending us a pantastic 1,644 parcels in March.

Since our last Talking Pants, we’ve provided new pants and new & gently worn bras to 3 organisations:

• 700 pairs of pants to Freedom4girls to be included in their hygiene kits for girls in Kenya but also to support schools in the Leeds area.
• 1,011 pairs of pants to Days for Girls to be included in their hygiene kits going to Africa.
• 380 pairs of pants and bras to Sheffield Working Women’s Opportunities Project, an organisation supporting vulnerable women involved in sex work and street prostitution.

Huge congratulations to the University of Strathclyde Netball Club who managed to complete their Seven Hills Challenge in good time with some fab weather and no injuries! 30km – Pantastic! Half of the funds they raised will be coming to Smalls for All as they’re supporting us as their Charity of the Year, and we can’t thank them enough for their efforts on our behalf.

Thanks to you, we were able to provide underwear to the Zambia and Malawi Community Partnership recently. The partnership’s Michael James told us, “We work through Tafika Youth Organisation, a Registered Community Based Organisation from rural northern Malawi. Tafika are a volunteer organisation operating in 500 villages and have created a Sports Academy structure containing over 200 teams (netball and football). Tafika uses sport as a mechanism for behaviour change and their netball teams are now playing in the senior Malawian league and last year finished 6th. Malawi is ranked #6 in the world for Netball but the young women in the senior teams and the girls in the village teams play in their day clothes and often have no underwear and sports bras are unheard of. This project aims to equip 20 village netball teams with the underwear they need to be able to play in comfort.

“Tafika uses any donations wisely, they don’t just give things away, instead they ask teams to volunteer for other community activities as a quid pro quo. This might be helping in the school gardens where Tafika are delivering home Grown School Feeding programs (Last year Tafikas volunteers grew and delivered over 1,000,000 meals in 10 schools). This is all about communities coming together and helping one another and donations like this are an important catalyst for community volunteerism as well as solving a very basic need among young women and girls.”

By 18 April, 2,818 packs of pants had been bought using our buy-to-give wish list – that’s 11,272 pairs of pants! Thanks to everyone who has donated this way. We set up this option so that you can purchase pants for us at wholesale prices, saving postage as well as benefiting from keen prices. Donating this way also helps Smalls, because it means we can get exactly what we really need at any time to be able to fulfil the underwear requests we receive.

As always, thank you for supporting Smalls,
Maria