Lincoln women-owned business using Lent to give back to other women

Three years ago Tosha Benes and Allison Luth decided to do something different for Lent.

Instead of giving something up they decided to give back.

Two duo owns Purely Maid, a women powered green cleaning business, so they decided to focus their efforts on helping other women.

“We chose to do a female oriented project, we thought tower of tampons would be the way to go so we collected some products and ended up with 13,000 the first year,” Tosha Benes said.

Benes and Luth collect tampons, pads, and other feminine hygiene products during Lent, the 40 before Easter.

The two place bins all over Lincoln for people to drop items off at.

All the products they collect are given to middle and high schools in Lincoln, Cedars, Saint Monica’s, and they even donated to flood victims.

“A lot of times people want to help out others but feminine hygiene products are not the first thing you think of. You clean out your closet and drop your clothes off at the collection site, you take food to the food bank, and those things are definitely all needed too, but people don’t really think of pads and tampons as a need. People don’t stop to think about how expensive they are,” Allison Luth said.

This year the duo is hoping to double the number of products they collected last year to 50,000.

After a big shopping spree to Sam’s Club Saturday afternoon they have just over 12,000 tampons.

The women are confident they’ll be able to reach their goal and say the desire to help women like themselves keeps them going.

“As a single mom myself I realize sometimes there are things I give up for my kids and I know these women are also giving up things for their families, it just feels really good to help them have some dignity,” Luth said.

If you would like to donate to the Tower of Tampons you can drop items off at Goldenrod Pastries near 48th and Prescott, Cheney Psychiatric Associates near 40th and Old Cheney, and Surgical Associates PC near 70th and A Streets.

You can also contact the women through their Facebook page to arrange a pickup time and location (click here).