Joanie Balderstone and Rebecca McIntire had tampons filling their guest room, pads stacking up in the living room and bras all over their dining-room table.
The Cherry Hill, N.J., couple had so many female products they had to migrate everything to a commercial complex on Greentree Road. Their three-room office holds more than 20,000 tampons and pads and a few-thousand bras, running the gamut from sizes 30A to 52DD. Plus, they can special-order other sizes as needed.
Two years ago, Balderstone and McIntire created Distributing Dignity as an official nonprofit. The organization donates bras and other feminine-hygiene products to shelters and women’s centers.
Distributing Dignity sprang from an experience Balderstone and McIntire had while donating gently used business clothing in Camden in 2009. One woman said it was great to get the clothes, but she didn’t have a decent bra to wear underneath, and going braless to a job interview is not the best look.
“Coming from a two-woman household, it was one of those smack-your-forehead moments,” Balderstone said. “We’ve been buying these female products in double for years, and never thought to include them in anything we ever donated.”
Balderstone and McIntire met in the early 1990s at Lehigh University in Bethlehem. They rushed the same sorority, Delta Zeta, and have long histories with community service. They became fast friends and started dating their senior year. After graduation, the two moved to Cherry Hill, where Balderstone grew up.
“I just knew, being in Cherry Hill, nobody would bat an eye at two women buying a house together,” Balderstone said. “I felt very comfortable having us move back here.”
It wasn’t far from home for McIntire, who grew up in Oakland in North Jersey.
They had a civil union in 2007 and got married in 2014.
The couple held their first “Mardi Bra” party in 2010. They invited friends to their house — including many women they met in Delta Zeta — and asked each to bring an unopened package of feminine-hygiene products or a new bra.
“We were really pleasantly surprised,” McIntire said. “People came with bags full of stuff. For the number of women we had, and the amount of stuff we collected, it was very satisfying.
“Just experiencing, first-hand, women coming together, it’s very powerful,” she added.
On a Saturday in September, the two were packing tampons, pads and bras in cardboard boxes to send to Rosie’s Place, a new partner organization in Boston that bills itself as the first women’s shelter in the country.
Last year, Distributing Dignity worked with 12 organizations and served about 500 women in three states, McIntire said. By the end of this year, Distributing Dignity will reach 30 partner organizations across 13 states.
Any organizations that serve a female population can qualify as a partner organization. Potential partners fill out a basic application detailing their needs, which is evaluated by the eight-person board of Distributing Dignity. Balderstone and McIntire hand-deliver most goods if the drive is within two hours. Otherwise, they mail packages.
McIntire worked off an inventory sheet, prepared by Balderstone, which listed the bra sizes Rosie’s Place had requested. She arranged the bras into zippered plastic bags, while Balderstone searched through plastic tubs to pull the right count of tampons and pads. The process moved like clockwork around a folding table in the middle of the office.
Work on Distributing Dignity often gets done on evenings and weekends. McIntire works full-time as a project manager at a delivery company, and Balderstone works part-time as an office manager for a law practice.
Before heading to work in the mornings, Balderstone usually responds to Distributing Dignity emails for an hour or two. She coordinates efforts with people who are working on collections or have questions about the organization. At lunchtime, Balderstone and McIntire touch base to divide duties that still need to get taken care of that day, like returning phone calls or stopping by the post office to mail packages.
The couple receives nearly as many packages as they send. Distributing Dignity has a wish list on Amazon (http://ow.ly/Tbhom) for people to order donations. Sometimes the donations are mailed to partner organizations in recycled Amazon boxes.
Balderstone and McIntire said their operation has grown exponentially over the last year through word of mouth. Another one of their new partner organizations, the Ali Forney Center in New York City, helps them reach transgender women. It’s the first partner organization that specifically assists LGBT people.
“The social worker asked us how we would feel about giving bras for the transgender kids they have there,” Balderstone said. “We were like, ‘Of course.’”
“We tried to make the bras very feminine, but still age-appropriate,” she said, noting Ali Forney serves a lot of teenagers.
Balderstone said partnering with Ali Forney really hit home for her and her wife. She said she couldn’t imagine being a teenager and being kicked out by family.
Both Balderstone and McIntire come from supportive families, they said.
“Neither one of us was worried we were going to lose family over it,” said Balderstone, who has two older brothers. “It wasn’t a fun conversation to have, but I knew once the dust settled, we would go back to things as they were.”
They were lucky, said McIntire, who has two older sisters. Even 20 years ago, things were a lot more conservative. She remembered watching the 1997 episode of “Ellen” in which Ellen DeGeneres came out. She and Balderstone both gaped.
“What’s really great is, we went back [to Lehigh University] about a year ago and they actually had on campus a student center that was LGBT,” McIntire said. “We thought, That’s so great to see, because it was not there when we were. I’m happy for students now. It’s just less of an issue. There’s more support.”
“We knew who we were, but not everyone has support.”
That’s part of the reason Balderstone and McIntire do what they do: to lift up other women, no matter what.
For more information, visit www.distributingdignity.org.