Period/Postpartum Supply Shed Among Latest CAREs Grant Awardees
Shelley Aragoncillo
It’s not easy being a menstruating person, or someone who’s just gone through childbirth; besides the mood swings, the pain, and other ill effects, there’s the need for tampons, pads, and other products. But not everyone has easy, affordable access to these necessities, especially right now when so many people are going through hard economic times. Enter Grab-n-Flow, a new program which seeks to reduce or eliminate barriers to menstrual and postpartum products for all in the community.
Grab-n-Flow is the brainchild of Shelley Aragoncillo, a clinical research coordinator in Penn Medicine’s family planning division. Through her work in the community, she came to learn about the challenges of period and postpartum poverty.
Thinking of her newborn child, and how difficult it would be to manage a new-parenthood without access to essential personal-care supplies, Aragoncillo set up a small shed outside of her South Philadelphia home. She fills it with all kinds of products that menstruating or postpartum people depend on; anyone in the community is welcome to take whatever they need at no charge. Grab-n-Flow is supported by donations, and recently won a $2,000 CAREs grant from Penn Medicine.
CAREs grants are awarded quarterly to a variety of community-outreach programs spearheaded or supported by Penn Medicine faculty, staff, students, and trainees. Over the past decade, the initiative has granted over $750,000 to more than 750 projects in Penn Medicine’s service area, ranging from ballroom dance classes for teens and adults with special needs, to literacy efforts aimed at children in West Philadelphia, and more.
In addition to quarterly grants, since 2019 the CAREs program has selected one of its grantees to receive an annual CAREs Community Champion Award. In the fall of 2021, this award was given to Beth
Widdowson, a practice coordinator with Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health, for A.I.M to Empower – a nonprofit that provides free yoga classes to underserved communities in the Lancaster area. The Community Champion Award is given to a CAREs-funded program whose growth and outcomes exceeded expectations.
With the help of its own CAREs grant, Grab-n-Flow may well be on its way to similar success. Aragoncillo is currently working with the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Maternal and Infant Health Community Action Network (CAN) to open Grab-n-Flow sheds at branches in underserved communities, and even dreams of the program being a model for a national movement. “Period poverty and period stigma are so prevalent in the world and don’t need to be,” she said in a 6abc segment in which she was featured as a “Hometown Hero” for her efforts; Grab-n-Flow was also featured on the Today Show.
Learn more about the Penn Medicine CAREs grant program at PennMedicine.org/Community, and read more stories about Penn Medicine in the community at Service in Action: CommunityImpact.PennMedicine.org.