Bozho jayek!
Hello everyone!

December 2025

It is only when the snow is falling and animals are hibernating that many U.S. Indigenous people tell their sacred stories. We hope you have the time to slow down this holiday season and share your special stories and traditions with family and friends.

As the year closes, we are full of good news. In addition to the four New York schools showcased in our School Spotlight below, we added six other schools since our September newsletter – three in New Mexico (on the Jicarilla Apache reservation) and three in Wyoming (serving the Northern Arapahoe Community). We now partner with over 240 individual schools and organizations. The generosity of our many donors and volunteers has allowed us to distribute – this year alone – over 750,000 period care items and some 48,000 books, moon time bags and Auntie bags. We have distributed more than 5 million period care items since our 2018 start, and estimate that we supported the period care needs of 32,000 menstruators during 2025.

In January we will add to the team a talented kwe (woman) who we expect to take our Operations and Development work to new heights. In our next newsletter we will provide you with a proper introduction to her. With her added support and your ongoing generosity, we can meet our crazy ambitious goal — reaching our 10 million-period-care-items-distributed target by our 10th anniversary in 2028!  Please help us celebrate the individual agency and success of those we support, and break the stigma that typically surrounds periods.

Sending thanks and wishing you a peaceful holiday season,

Eva Marie Carney
Founder + Executive Director

Strengthening the Circle from AAIA

Strengthening the Circle: Collaborating with Native Nations to Support Native Youth is a guide published by the Association on American Indian Affairs, the oldest national nonprofit dedicated to protecting sovereignty, preserving culture, educating youth, and building capacity in Native communities. This guide offers practical strategies for professionals and community partners to work respectfully and effectively with Native Nations, particularly in systems that affect young people.

Strengthening the Circle is designed to move beyond transactional interaction and toward culturally grounded collaboration. It provides tools such as checklists, scripts, and step-by-step guidance to help practitioners identify Native youth, engage their Nations as sovereign partners, and ensure that supports reflect the cultural contexts of the young people they serve. By centering culture, community, and respectful partnership, the guide tackles systemic gaps that too often diminish identity and opportunity for Native youth.

For The Kwek Society and our partners, this resource is especially meaningful. At the core of our mission is a commitment to dignity, equity, and culturally responsive support for students in schools. Strengthening the Circle reinforces the importance of relationship-based work and deep listening when serving young people across diverse communities. It reminds us that meaningful impact comes from understanding context, honoring sovereignty, and working collaboratively — principles that resonate strongly with our own values and efforts.

Whether you are an educator, nonprofit partner, or community leader, Strengthening the Circle offers actionable insight and thoughtful frameworks that can enrich your work and deepen your understanding and support for culturally grounded youth engagement.
 

You can explore more resources on our website.

Salmon River Central School District

Fort Covington, New York

We are excited to introduce you to our newest partner – the Salmon River Central School District in Fort Covington, NY. This is our first partnership in New York State, bringing our reach to 22 states across Turtle Island.

The Salmon River Central School District is a small, rural school district in the foothills of the Adirondacks along the Saint Lawrence River in northernmost New York. The district serves students from the towns of Fort Covington, Bombay, Brasher, Bangor and Westville, as well as Mohawk students living on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation who attend St. Regis Mohawk School, a Pre-K through Grade 5 school located in Akwesasne.

(Left to right) Kwek volunteers Edward Pratt, Barbara Hannigan (Board President), Eva Marie Carney (Kwek Executive Director), and Kimberly Pratt (Kwek Treasurer), at our warehouse in Alexandria, December 5, 2025.

This month we began working with the district’s incredible team of school nurses to support the period care needs of more than 100 students across the district.

“We thank you for providing your products and beautifully sewn moon time bags to our students in need,” shared one of the nurses. “We have many students who may not have access to these items financially and will greatly benefit from receiving these products. What a great program!”

To help support students over winter break and throughout the spring semester, we sent 10 large boxes of period care, including pads, tampons, liners, and underwear for accidents, along with hundreds of moon time bags and Passage educational books, for distribution to students.

It is incredibly meaningful to ensure students have access to high-quality period care and educational resources. This work is made possible through the generosity of our corporate sponsors, foundations that support us, and individual donors.

Bras for Girls

This fall, Bras for Girls, our super-charged nonprofit partner, hit a milestone – they delivered 200,000 sports bras to athletes around the world! More than 10,000 of those bras were provided to the students and community members we support. We agree completely with Bras for Girls' mission statement: “Every girl deserves access to sports.” 

We are most grateful to Dr. Sarah Lesko, for setting up an organization that is so responsive to our requests for sports bras, and for taking the time to make this video supporting our partnership. Igwien (heartfelt thanks), Dr. Sarah and Bras for Girls -- we love partnering with you to benefit young women.

Barbara Hannigan
Board President

Our Board Vice President and Newsletter Editor Paige Willett recently sat down with Barbara Hannigan, our Board President, to learn more about Barbara’s commitment to our work.

Here’s Paige’s report:
Barbara has been involved with The Kwek Society since our start. She is deeply invested in the collective work that makes providing period supplies to Indigenous students and their peers and communities possible. In addition to leading the board as it seeks to help flip the script on period poverty, she spends time most every week helping to inventory in-kind donations and ship supplies to our partner schools and community-based organizations.

For Barbara, the heart of our mission is dignity. “Period care is a basic human need that should be fulfilled for everyone,” Barbara told me.

She sees the injustice of students missing school due to lack of access to period products as both a moral and spiritual call to action. She related that hearing directly from the students The Kwek Society serves makes the work especially meaningful.

“One of my favorite things in the world is going into our warehouse office and finding in the mail a note or card students have written. It motivates me when I read all the lovely things they say about what a difference our work has made in their lives,” she told me.”

Those moments reaffirm why she believes The Kwek Society is worthy of support. Her message to readers is:

“If you are looking for a cause to support where you can really be assured that there are positive benefits from the mission, consider making The Kwek Society part of your year-end giving, or committing to a monthly donation to help us meet this monthly need.”

Barbara also notes that there are many other ways to help, including sewing and filling Auntie and/or moon time bags for us, hosting a period supply drive (she has done this repeatedly, recruiting help from her local jazzercise class), sharing our social media posts, or inviting us to speak with a community group.

To learn more about Barbara, read her biography here.

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