Bozho jayek!
Hello everyone!

September 2024

Happy Autumn! We at The Kwek Society are in full work – and full celebration – mode.

We hit the 4-million-items distributed mark and recently blew past that to 4.3 million products distributed. We have restocked school partners with period supplies for the new school year, and over the last few months, we’ve added a number of new partners, including Cherokee Middle School and Cherokee High School in North Carolina. These are the first partner schools we are supporting in that state and in the Southern United States. We also added our first school in Washington state, Paschal Sherman Indian School. You can read more about the Washington school partnership below.

To help fund this work, we accepted new, generous donations from funders Wildhorse Foundation, The Pad Project, the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, and the Waub Ajijaak Press & Foundation. We also began receiving promotional and branding support gifted to us by Outside PR to help promote our efforts.

We are ready to help more menstruators, so please let us know of U.S. schools with significant numbers of Indigenous students who need our help. Please join in to help us!

Migwetch/thank you for supporting us as we celebrate moon times across Indian Country!

Bama pi (until later),

Eva Marie Carney
Founder + Executive Director

Shop to benefit The Kwek Society on Saturday, October 12 with independent, woman-owned bookstore One More Page Books in Arlington, Virginia, from 11:00AM to 4:00PM, in store and online. Fifteen percent of your purchase amount will be shared with us to help us end period poverty among Indigenous students and their peers!

Introducing the Auntie Bag

Announcing the debut of our Auntie Bag! We are calling on volunteers to make and stuff Auntie Bags for us. These are lovely, lined drawstring bags that hold a moon time cycle’s worth of pads along with other items (fresh underwear, a paper period tracker, etc.) a student can add as needed for comfort and support during moon time. We call them “Auntie Bags” because they reflect the love and support of all the aunties out there – trusted adults who care about students. They are significantly larger than our moon time bags, which hold a couple of pads and liners, and are a response to community requests that we offer an aesthetically pleasing bag to hold a month of period care items.

We hope that students receiving our moon time bags and our Auntie Bags will be uplifted by our message that we are all related and in community together and that everyone behind The Kwek Society is excited to celebrate each student’s moon time for the natural and exciting development it is.

Want to make Auntie Bags for us? Follow this link to step-by-step written instructions and an accompanying video, curated for us by Citizen Potawatomi sisters Czarina and Jayne, the k’wek (women) who in 2018 created the pattern for our moon time bags. We’d love you to sew them up up, stuff them with 20 size two pads, and ship them off to us!  And if you’d prefer to simply sew and mail, we’d love that too — we can stuff them.

When we receive the bags from you, we will add our information card to them, just as we do for the moon time bags. The front of the card reprints a portion of a poem about the moon that celebrates life and the connectedness of all earth’s inhabitants. The poem is, Remember, is by Mvskoke Nation citizen and 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States Joy Harjo. The back of the card directs students to the part of our website that highlights moon time teachings and links to educational materials and health and safety-related resources. We share the poem, teachings, and links to encourage students’ feelings of connectedness to Indigenous ways of knowing and to empower them. Please help us reach more students through our bags and included information cards, if you are able!

“Big Auntie” tip from Czarina and Jayne – they used one rectangular piece of fabric, 13×30 inches, for the outside part of the bag; two rectangular pieces, 13×15 inches for the lining/inside of the bag; and cut a piece of fabric to 5×5 inches, turned down the top edge, and then zig-zagged around the sides and bottom to make the pocket into which we’ll insert our card. They stitched the pocket to the inside of the bag. (All these resources are on our website under the “How to Help” tab.)

Paschal Sherman Indian School

Omak, Washington

Paschal Sherman Indian School sits within the boundaries of the Confederated Tribes of The Colville Reservation. PSIS Superintendent Waylon Michel contacted us in July 2024 to request period support for the school’s students, including about 50 students who live in school dormitories through ninth grade.

We jumped right in to supply our moon time bags and other period care and puberty education materials for the 100 or so students getting ready to start the new school year. This is our first school in Washington, which is an exciting development!

“What a great program. Having the feminine supplies on hand breaks down one more barrier between students and their opportunity for happy, healthy learning,” said PSIS School Nurse Ben Swartsel (shown above). “The personalized bags are beautiful, and you can tell the care that was put into making them.”

Ben also shared this distribution photo that he took earlier this month. (Some of the students, like some of us at The Kwek Society, are a bit shy.)

Peggy Longerbeam

Peggy Longerbeam lives in Arlington, Virginia, and is one of our most prolific seamstresses. She’s made The Kwek Society thousands of moon time bags to distribute to students across the country. Peggy has been sewing and donating to us since we introduced our moon time bags; her contributions have made a huge impact.

At 78 years old, Peggy is a practiced and gifted sewer and has been making clothes and household goods out of cloth for most of her life. She began making moon time bags in 2020 during the pandemic, crafting them from the pieces of fabric left over from making cloth masks for friends, family and some of the students we were supporting at that time. Peggy’s first donation was 35 moon time bags. Over the last three years she’s made  approximately 130 each month. Needless to say, we are thrilled to have her contributions.

“It’s so enjoyable. I’m a very creative person, so this was good for me to just use all kinds of fabrics and colors,” she said. “The Kwek Society has a really good mission. This is something that’s needed all over the country. It seems like a basic right for a young lady to have these products.”

Igwien (a heartfelt thanks) to Peggy for being our long-time dedicated supporter. She is vital to our mission, addressing period poverty and period shame one moon time bag after another! 

Kimberly Pratt
Board Treasurer

Kimberly Pratt, The Kwek Society’s Treasurer, is a dual citizen of the United States and the Citizen Potawatomi Nation (CPN). She is presently on a Joint Duty Assignment at the Pentagon, serving as a strategic planner for international treaty negotiations on the Joint Staff. In 2021, she completed the Graduate Fellowship Certificate program in Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction from the National Defense University and Missouri State University program. In 2013, she retired as a Colonel from the Air Force Reserves culminating a military career spanning 34 years.

The highlights of her career include entry into the 1983 class of the U.S. Air Force Academy  (women were admitted starting in 1979!); selection as the first woman to serve as Airborne Intelligence Officer on the EC-130, Airborne Battlefield Command and Control Center (1986-1988); service as first Commander of the 139th Intelligence Squadron, Georgia Air National Guard (2008-2010); and service as the Senior Reservist at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (2012-2013).

Kim holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the U.S. Air Force Academy, and a Master of Science in Strategic Intelligence (M.S.S.I.) degree from the Joint Military Intelligence College, Defense Intelligence Agency, Bolling Air Force Base, Washington D.C. (2005). She lives in Alexandria, Virginia and is married to Edward Pratt, an aerospace engineer, retired from the Civil Service. She has two children who are both CPN tribal citizens, and two stepchildren.

We are grateful to Kim for finding time for us and for all the ways she and Ed advance our mission.

Want some sweet swag to add to your Fall wardrobe, laptop or water bottle? We’ve got it! Check out our swag shop!  We offer a got a wide range of t-shirts, hoodies, caps, stickers and more that we think you’ll love. All profits fuel our work!

We hope you’ll visit our How to Help page for volunteer and donation ideas, including links for giving to us one-time or monthly. Do you like to use GooglePay or Venmo when donating? It’s easy to do that, by accessing the link to ActBlue Charities. We are grateful for each and every donation!

The Kwek Society, incorporated in Virginia, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (EIN # 82-4369803). Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. Our financial statement is available on written request from the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Office of Charitable and Regulatory Programs, PO Box 1163, Richmond, Virginia 23218. Our Candid/Guidestar report can be found here.

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