Home > Talking Pants > Talking Pants – January 2020

Total underwear collected is 1,230,881

A good start to 2020. We’ve given 2,470 pairs of pants to 4 organisations since our last Talking Pants. Our thanks to:

  • Tina Leslie of Freedom4Girls, a period poverty charity working in Kenya and Uganda. Tina is organising 400 pairs of pants to be given to girls they’re supporting with hygiene kits in Kenya.
  • Tracy Taylor of the Tumaini Fund. Tracy is organising 300 pairs of pants to be given to girls they’re supporting with hygiene kits in Kagera, Tanzania.
  • Brigitte Matthews of Christian African Relief for organising the distribution of 520 pairs of pants to a project they support in Cameroon, United Action for Children.
  • And last but not least, Days for Girls for organising 1,250 pairs of pants for their hygiene kits.

I was asked recently what the highlight for me was in 2019, and after thinking about it for a few minutes and looking back over the year, I couldn’t name just one thing.

  • We ended 2019 with an amazing 1,194,011 pants and bras being distributed since Smalls started in 2010. In that time, donations have gone to Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Namibia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zanzibar. And in August we also made our very first donation in the UK.
  • In 2019, we provided 360,803 pants and bras. This number represents 42 requests for underwear ranging from a couple of hundred that would be going in a suitcase to 80,000 that would be stored and distributed over a period of 2-3 months.
  • Tuesday 11 June was a memorable day, and to start with for all the wrong reasons! Turning up at our warehouse to find we had been broken into a week before we were due to move wasn’t great, but thanks to the hard work and dedication of the volunteers (and strangers!), we achieved the impossible and moved everything that we needed to on one day. And again thanks to the volunteers, we managed to settle in quickly and get back to the business of opening and sorting your donations, and providing underwear for those in need.

So I hope you agree 2019 was a good year, and we hope 2020 will be an even better one.

Happy to say that we’re now opening donations received in November. A little reminder that the address for donations has changed. The address for all underwear donations now is Five Sisters Business Park, Westwood, West Calder EH55 8PN.

Maria