Loaves and Fishes Hygiene Drive

Happy Healthy Us recently coordinated a hygiene drive in WashU and the greater STL area for Loaves & Fishes St. Louis, a local homeless service. Our Director of On-Campus Outreach, Vivian Gao, was the main organizer of the initiative, as she had helped coordinate a hygiene drive in her hometown with success in the past.

Loaves & Fishes is a food pantry and homeless shelter that has been serving St. Louis for over 37 years. Currently, their pantry serves 13,000 people, and their emergency homeless shelter serves 400 people, over 53% of which are children. Their mission is to provide support to individuals facing economic hardships, and they do so through their Core Programs: Emergency Shelter, Educational Program, Food Pantry, and Bridge Program. Under these Core Programs, Loaves & Fishes aims to empower individuals towards establishing stable homes and improving their financial security. Additional information on Loaves & Fishes may be found at their website (https://loavesandfishes-stl.org/).

In conducting the hygiene drive itself, we first distributed flyers around a few neighborhoods in St. Louis outlining our initiative, the list of donatable items and any additional information on Loaves & Fishes, and the timeline for item pick-up. Then, on WashU’s campus, we advertised the drive through multiple social media avenues and flyers placed in campus buildings. Loaves & Fishes provides a cohesive donatable items list on their website, along with a specified section for items with the greatest need. For the greater STL community, we closely followed the provided list for items under greatest need, as we mainly targeted upper and middle class families. However, in consideration of the items that undergraduate students may have at disposal, we opted to adapt the donatable item list provided on the flyers distributed on WashU’s campus.

Ultimately, we collected hygiene products from individuals who reached out to us after seeing these advertisements and from monetary donations that were used to purchase additional items. Our most collected items were soap, hand sanitizer, and antibacterial wipes, mainly targeting communities at higher risk for COVID-19. In addition, we collected menstrual products, shower care products, laundry detergents, and others.