Things people actually need

I put together two kinds of kit for two shelters: first aid kits, and personal hygiene kits for girls and women. Doing both at once taught me something I would not have noticed doing either one alone.

The first aid kits I bought. They come ready-made in a sealed plastic case, twelve items, standardised, a few dollars each, available from any pharmacy. Somebody has already worked out what belongs in one, and the whole category is a solved problem. My contribution was choosing to buy them.

The hygiene kits did not exist until I made them. There is no shelf anywhere stocking the thing a girl actually needs when her family has lost its housing and she has her period. So I chose every item and packed each pouch by hand: period supplies, hand wipes, opaque disposal bags, and a printed card with care and hygiene guidance so the kit explains itself to whoever opens it, without them having to ask anyone anything.

Each pouch also holds a new pair of cotton underwear. Accidents happen, and when they do, underwear is the one thing you cannot rinse out and put straight back on. At home it is a non-problem: you open a drawer. Without a drawer to open, a single accident means spending the rest of the day in something soiled. That item is not sold as part of any kit either, and it is the one I would least want to leave out.

That asymmetry is the part I keep thinking about. A cut finger is treated as a universal problem worth mass-producing a solution for. Menstruation happens to half the population every month, and the equivalent product is not on any shelf, which means shelters run short of these supplies constantly. Food assistance does not cover them. They cost a lot for their size. They are hard to ask for out loud.

I assembled the pouches at my dining table over several days and delivered everything through the Seva Commons Foundation to two shelters it partners with: Tri-Valley Haven, and FESCO Banyan House, the transitional living program run by the Family Emergency Shelter Coalition, which houses around four hundred parents and children a year in mid-Alameda County.

Both serve families who have lost their housing, which is the situation I had in mind the whole time I was packing. A family arriving at a shelter has what it could carry, and the things a girl needs every month are exactly the things least likely to have made it into that bag.

Dignity was the constraint I designed around. The pouch is opaque, it looks like an ordinary bag, and nothing about carrying it announces what is inside.

Over 2025 I put my service hours into the kitchen at the Seva Commons Foundation, making sandwiches and assembling meal bags for local homeless shelters and foster homes. More than three hundred bags went out over the year.

Seva Commons is a local 501(c)(3) that runs weekly meal distributions across Alameda, Santa Clara, and San Joaquin counties, alongside supply drives and winter care packages. The weekly rhythm is the thing that makes it work. Shelters can plan around a delivery that arrives every Friday.

The work is repetitive by design. Sandwiches get made in a line, bagged, and labelled by contents so that anyone with an allergy can tell at a glance what they are holding. Then the sides go in: chips, an apple, a fruit cup, juice. Every bag is identical because every bag has to be. A shift is measured in trays.

What the repetition teaches you is how thin the margin is. A family in emergency housing is not short of one meal. They are short of every meal, indefinitely, and a bag covers exactly one. Three hundred is a real number and also a very small one. Sitting with the distance between those two facts is what stopped me thinking of service as hours you accumulate and started me thinking about what could actually be built. The hygiene kits came out of that.

In December 2025 I organised and assembled fifty holiday stockings for kids at local emergency shelters and foster homes, as part of the winter care drive run by the Seva Commons Foundation.

Each one held fuzzy holiday socks, gloves, packets of hot chocolate, microwave popcorn, candy canes, lip balm, hand lotion, a tangram puzzle, and a pen and pencil. The mix was deliberate. Roughly half of it gets used up in a week. The other half stays: a puzzle, a pen, gloves that will still be around in February. A stocking made entirely of candy is over the moment the candy is gone.

Everything was bought in bulk and assembled on the living room floor. That part looks like a small warehouse operation and mostly involves counting.

The cards took the longest. I wrote all fifty by hand, one at a time, instead of printing a message and copying it. That decision cost an entire evening and it is the only part of the project I would defend at length. A printed card is a donation. A handwritten one is a person. Children in foster placements often move between homes with their belongings in a bag, and they are on the receiving end of a great deal of anonymous generosity. Handwriting is the cheapest way I know to signal that somebody was thinking about them specifically, and not about the general category of children who need things.

Sewcial is American High’s sewing, knitting, and crocheting club. As activities coordinator I planned what we actually did each week.

I pushed the club toward projects that ended with something going out the door instead of into a drawer. Members still got to show off what they could make, but the thing they made was something another person would use. Skill and usefulness are not in tension, and a club is a good place to prove it.