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The first thing that often comes to mind when one hears ‘Simple Bare Necessities’ is the green pastures of the ‘Jungle Book’ where Baloo, the bear, sings a song and tells Mowgli about the raw elements of nature like fruits and vegetable helpful to human beings and animals for survival. Baloo sings with joy, ‘...the bare necessities will come to you’. This line is not always true. The bare minimum is not always available to the unsheltered who are seen struggling and residing out in the open on the streets of Reno.
However, this song title ended up being the official name of a club that helps people of the houseless community in more ways than one. “ Initially we came up with the name ‘Helping Reno’ and something related to the ‘Pack’ and soon we were like this is not working, that is when I came up with the name ‘Simple Bare Necessities’ from the Jungle book theme song,” Sneha Thomas one of the founders said. ‘It all worked out in the end and funneled up into this one cool club, which is really fun to see,” she added.
Janavi Sathappan, Thomas and Don Maria Benny are roommates. They often made weekly trips to the Northtowne Winco of Reno for grocery shopping. “We noticed a lot of homeless people at the intersections of the roads every time we went there and read the signs that they would hold in their hands, asking for help,” Thomas said. “We discussed with each other about ways we could help them. We wanted to safely do something and help them out even during the time of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
That is when the three students all in the third year of college at UNR as undergraduates got along with their two other friends Angeline Nguyen and Genesis Tranquilino to start a club for helping the impoverished. “ Angeline and Genesis were our neighbors in sophomore year and that is how we all decided to come together,” Thomas explained.
This five member club has also set specific roles for each club officer to play. Janavi Sathappan, President of SBNUNR had prior experience of serving at a club called Seva in her freshman year and was very excited to bring her previous experience into the new club. She manages events and coordinates with different planners and community services. She, along with Benny, the Treasurer, attends various club funding meetings to receive funding assistance and maintain the paperwork for the club. Vice President Sneha Thomas mostly looks at coordination through emails and does event planning for the club but is also readily available to help anyone who needs assistance in the club. Genesis Tranquilino, the Secretary, looks at the various other organizing aspects and the designing of Powerpoints where she makes sure that the color schemes of the documents maintain identity with the theme and logo of the club. Angeline Nguyen, the Public Relations Coordinator had designed the flyers and is mostly responsible for managing the social media accounts of the club.
Volunteering Outreach
There were talks about the formation of the club since the previous Spring but the club became registered and fully operational around April 2021. “It was very last minute but our club got approval just before the day of the club fair,” Sathappan shared. As a group of undergraduate students at UNR, the club receives funding of $500 for each school year from The Associated Students of University of Nevada (ASUN) which is a student government body for the undergraduates at University of Nevada, Reno.
The club members volunteered for the soup kitchen with St. Vincent’s last year and also took part in organizing and racking clothes for the St. Vincent’s Thrift Store around the month of September. On October 15, 2021 they conducted their first in-person meeting where they got other student volunteers to help them with packaging of feminine hygiene products for the women on the streets of Reno.
A total of five women volunteers showed up at the Ansari business building at UNR where all of them helped pack a total of 50 bags of feminine hygiene products that the club officers thought would be useful to any unhoused woman on the Reno streets.
Powerpoints and Partnerships
The event began with a brief introductory Powerpoint presentation that Tranquilino put together for the meeting. Soon after, the club members and volunteers played a game of bingo cards in order to get to know each other better. Tranquilino also played some music in order to keep the event light and interactive. The volunteers were instructed to pack each brown bag with six sanitary napkins, three tampons, two sanitary wipes and two panty liners.
Sathappan wrote little messages on each bag with colored pens to give it a more personal touch. The students laughed when they found out that a bag being packed with feminine hygiene goods also had the brand named ‘Dude Wipes’ in it. After the packaging the club members said that they would themselves drive to the Reno Gospel Mission in order to drop the bags off. “ We are not doing in-person handouts due to the Covid situation,” Thomas said.
SBNUNR, though a small group, has often had as many as 95 people reach out to them when they’ve conducted Google Surveys.
“ This work is hard with Covid restrictions but when volunteers and other outreach groups reach out to us in large numbers, we find it really cool and that keeps us going forward,” Benny said. Though their bigger focus is helping the houseless people, their plan is to prioritize better health and sanitation for the unhoused women population of Reno.
Benny says she has also been in touch with Red Equity, an organization in Reno trying to end period poverty. SBNUNR is still in talks with them and is trying to help partner with them or get donations for the organization in the near future. Since SBNUNR is a fairly new club with limited resources, they are yet to help some bigger organizations who work around organic female hygiene goods. “ Those organic products are costly and would need a better packaging event and not like the small 50-bag packaging we did in October,” the group said. However, they acknowledge this as a great starting point and are looking at conducting more events to help out the community in 2022.