This might sound difficult to imagine. How a small business that already experiences financial ups and down be committed to support social projects with no funds?
The idea of supporting women has always been in Bimba’s DNA but it was not so clear to me, as a small business owner.
The new generation of small business owners tends to include some social aspect to their structure. Luckily there is a lot of initiatives and motivation to make things better in various fields such as education, environment or health..
What are the ways to support social actions? How your small company can help others?
I did a little research on companies from the same sector to understand their commitment with women and for those involved, what this actually implied.
Many companies selling period underwear support foundations by providing menstrual products either for free or partially funding actions. Being a small business, our funds would not allow us to help financially yet . I thought that we would need to wait for a few years to start getting involved.
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And then I realized that not everything is money… When there is a will, there is a way! There is no better time to start helping than when you are still flexible on your schedules. The workload of the beginning gives you some freedom (at least it did for me).
Being based in Asia (Thailand) for the time being, I decided that this was the perfect place to act, so I got in touch with a few Women’s Associations to see how I could help them.
What form of help can I provide?
As you might know, period underwear is a big revolution for women around the world as it has a huge environmental impact (as traditional pads and tampons are creating a lot of waste), health impact (as traditional products are often toxic) and social impact (it empowers women to take care of their health).
There was one Chinese proverb that kept coming back to my mind: “give a man a fish you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” I did not want to just provide products to these associations, I wanted them to learn how to make them!
So I contacted Women’s foundations with access to sewing machines and this is how the journey started… and I hope this will continue this way until time because more limited and money more available to support, to honour Bimba’s social commitment.