L.A. County offers free feminine hygiene products, diapers in pilot program

Los Angeles County will provide free female hygiene merchandise and diapers at choose services below a brand new pilot program, the Board of Supervisors introduced Tuesday.

This system will present female hygiene merchandise, diapers and different private care gadgets at choose county venues equivalent to parks, libraries and museums.

It can additionally embody the “identification of funding and a County division to manage a one-year pilot program, with a future plan for growth if decided profitable (by way of evaluation of information collected),” a information launch from movement co-author Supervisor Hilda Solis’s workplace reads.

The movement directs the county’s Chief Government Workplace — partnering with the Division of Parks & Recreation, Division of Public Social Providers and libraries, cultural venues and museums — to report again in 60 days on the outcomes of the pilot program.

“Simply as we offer rest room paper and cleaning soap in public restrooms, we also needs to present female hygiene merchandise and diapers, so that ladies’s fundamental well being wants, and the wants of their infants, might be met in our county restrooms,” Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, co-author of the movement, mentioned.

Interval poverty, outlined as insufficient entry to menstrual hygiene instruments and schooling, has a disparate impression and creates an extra monetary burden for many who menstruate, the movement states. This features a lack of entry to sanitary merchandise, washing services and waste merchandise.

“Lately, there was an overdue recognition that hygiene merchandise are expensive, and that value is disproportionately felt by girls,” a information launch from Supervisor Hilda Solis’s workplace reads.

With growing costs such, California lifted the gross sales tax for kids’s diapers and female hygiene merchandise for the following two years.

“LA County ought to use this chance to handle this structural inequity by offering free female hygiene merchandise and diapers at sure services the place mother and father and kids frequent,” Strong added.

The movement additionally directs the county’s Chief Government Workplace to assist federal and state laws decreasing the price of female merchandise and diapers, offering extra federal and state funding to cowl the price of offering these free merchandise to low-income residents, and/ or that will enable authorities advantages to cowl the price of female hygiene merchandise and diapers.

In a 2021 nationwide survey of menstruating teenagers, 1 in 4 reported struggling to afford interval merchandise — up from 1 in 5 in 2019, the movement says. An extra 4 in 5 both missed or knew somebody who missed class time as a result of they didn’t have entry to interval merchandise.

The common girl spends $13.25 per 30 days on interval merchandise, the movement says, citing current research.

The necessity for diapers can create comparable hardships, authors of the movement mentioned. Diaper producers cited the rise within the worth of uncooked supplies, delivery prices and the necessity to offset inflation as causes for worth will increase. Even earlier than the current spherical of inflation, low-income households have been spending roughly $1,000 a 12 months on diapers, or round 14% of their after-tax revenue, in keeping with the movement.