When Renee Gerlach of Hillsboro answers her phone, she often is greeted with the question, “Are you the free tampon lady?”
Renee Gerlach, the founder of The Aunt Rose Project.
Gerlach, 66, is the founder of The Aunt Rose Project, a group that provides teenage girls in need with free menstrual products, such as tampons, pads, menstrual cups, period underwear and feminine wash, as well as educational books about puberty and menstruation.
She started the group about five years ago, after one of her teenage son’s friends told her that girls at her high school were skipping school during their periods because they didn’t have access to menstrual products.
“There are girls here in Jefferson County who aren’t going to school because they don’t have the period supplies they need. I just thought that was crazy,” Gerlach said.
She said she looked around and couldn’t find many resources for girls to get the products they needed.
“You can go to the school nurse and tell her you need a pad or a tampon, but you only get one or two. At home they don’t have what they need. It was hard to imagine that parents aren’t providing what these kids need,” Gerlach said. “I was just surprised at how much of a need there is. You can’t buy feminine products with your EBT card.”
For families with low incomes, buying period products can be a financial hardship since they can’t be purchased through SNAP, WIC and Medicaid, she said.
Gerlach said she wanted to provide those products to girls and keep them in school, but when she started out, she encountered some naysayers who said providing period products to teenage girls was “too political,” adding that she was told if she started giving out free period products, it would leave the door open for others to try to give out other free products, such as condoms.
Those early reactions to her donation made her consider giving up.
“I was pretty depressed about that because I thought I was doing something really good. My feelings were really hurt to have somebody dismiss it like that,” Gerlach said.
Less than a week later, she received her first phone call asking if she was “the free tampon lady.”
The call was from Theresa Robson, board president for the Jefferson County Foster Children’s Fund, who told Gerlach the agency was in desperate need of menstrual products for the girls in foster care and needed her help.
Gerlach created an Aunt Rose Project Facebook group and invited friends she thought would be interested in helping and began posting updates when the JCFCF needed more products.
She said the group quickly grew, with people calling her to ask how they could help.
Robson said before partnering with The Aunt Rose Project, the JCFCF did not provide any period products to foster children, so foster families had to purchase them on their own.
“The girls appreciate that they can pick out the style or brand of the products they prefer, like their peers who are with more traditional family arrangements,” Robson said.
Gerlach said many people have reached out to her on Facebook to tell her stories about how they struggled to get period products as teenagers in foster care and resorted to using paper towels and toilet paper.
Now that the group is involved, foster families may pick up free products monthly for their teen girls, or they can grab some during JCFCF events, such as its winter holiday party in December, it’s Easter egg hunt in the spring and its summer family picnic.
Robson said the educational materials The Aunt Rose Project has provided are helpful, particularly with teens who don’t have adults they feel comfortable enough with to ask questions. “Often the teens are hesitant to ask (personal questions of) their placement providers, who they may not have been with long, or whom they don’t quite trust yet. This way they can learn appropriate terms for body parts and period products, along with learning about healthy body care.”
Robson said working with The Aunt Rose Project has made a difference for the JCFCF.
“Renee is a joy to work with, always pleasant and excited about impacting the lives of so many teen foster girls around our county. We love Renee and the Aunt Rost Project,” Robson said.
Gerlach said the group has grown over the years and is now supplying free, unopened boxes of feminine care items to not only the JCFCF, but also the Court Appointed Special Advocates of Jefferson County, Jefferson County Foster Closet, All for the Family, the Homeless Youth Initiative and Hillsboro schools.
She said any donations of open boxes she receives are given to Second Hand Heros in Crystal City, and they typically are distributed to adults in need.
Gerlach said she accepts donations of products but not cash. However, if people want to donate money to buy period products, they may write a check to one of the organizations the local Aunt Rose group supplies and write “Aunt Rose Project” in the memo so the group knows what those funds are meant for.
Gerlach said she would be happy to work with other Jefferson County schools that need menstrual products for their students and they may reach out to The Aunt Rose Project.
She said she has faced many health issues since starting the group, including a heart attack, rotator cuff surgery and three tumors, but it hasn’t stopped her yet.
“When every single girl in Jefferson County has what she needs to feel confident and secure in her time, then I’ll stop.”
Why Aunt Rose?
Gerlach said the name of the group came from a misunderstanding she had as a teenager while talking to a friend. They had made plans to go swimming, but the friend called her to cancel. “She said, ‘I can’t go swimming. Aunt Flow is here,’ and I asked, ‘Your Aunt Rose won’t let you go swimming?’ She said, ‘No, Aunt Flow … she comes every month,’ and I felt so stupid. So when we were going to name the Facebook page, we wanted to call ourselves aunties because if you don’t have your mom, who do you go to? Your auntie.”
“I said we should call it The Aunt Rose Project because Aunt Flow might not want you to go swimming with your friends and she might hold you back. But Aunt Rose wants you to go everywhere you want and do everything with dignity and confidence.”
The Aunt Rose Project has drop-off locations at The Pet Food Pantry in Otto, M and K Nails in Hillsboro, Back Rhodes Mercantile in Hillsboro, C and S Studio in Crystal City, Estro Ink in Crystal City and The Trippin Turtle in the South County Mall in south St. Louis County. A link to the group’s Amazon wish list is pinned to their Facebook page.
The Aunt Rose Project may be reached by calling 636-942-4245.