Toothbrush+
Why it Started
In 2023, while our club founder, Lily Setnik, was volunteering at Southern Peninsula Community Support in the Fresh Food program, she noticed that the support centre was consistently running low on personal hygiene supplies, like toothpaste and toothbrushes.
Lily couldn't help but think about this issue every time she helped make ‘easy food packs’ - packs filled with soft foods targeted at people who had deteriorating dental health, which made eating solid foods nearly impossible. In many cases, these problems had developed partly from a lack of access to hygiene products.
After consulting the volunteer coordinator, Karen Tatmam, she found out that one of their major challenges was obtaining a consistent, sustainable supply of hygiene items. At that time, they only received one-off donations from local community organisations. Because of this, their supply was highly unpredictable, leading to clients often finding that the products they needed most were out of stock.
For Lily, seeing clients who were often very hungry and distressed when they entered the support centre being told that the centre had run out of certain essential hygiene products never got easier. Lily was shocked that people living in the community she grew up in faced these challenges, especially in a privileged country such as Australia. So, she decided she wanted to find a solution so that everyone could live a happy and healthy life.
Early Ideas
After deciding to commit to the project, Lily began finding and purchasing cheap toothbrushes herself. However, this proved to be unsustainable in the long-term. During her final year of secondary schooling, a state government initiative called ‘The Smile Squad’ was rolled out to raise awareness about and to promote dental hygiene. As a result, local public schools across Victoria were supplied with hundreds and hundreds of packs, each containing a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and a water bottle. As each school was supplied with more than enough for every student, many boxes ended up going into storage and were left undistributed. (An additional issue with the program was that not all students valued the handouts, leading to the toothpaste being used as a graffiti tool.)
Seeing an opportunity waiting to be uncovered, Lily contacted her local high school to collect any remaining Smile Squad boxes they had. Happily, they agreed, and she sorted and delivered these remaining packs to the Southern Peninsula Community Support Centre. Once the new year rolled around, Lily coordinated members in the newly refounded Peninsula Rotaract Club (which she was the president of) to contact local state schools in Frankston and on the Mornington Peninsula to inquire about any leftover Smile Squad boxes that they could collect, sort, and donate. And so, the impact of her initial idea began to grow.
Support From Rotary
Pharmacies and schools have both been important partners for this project, but there is one more major player that should not be forgotten! As the program grew and Peninsula Rotaract grew with it, we spoke with more and more Rotary clubs in the area about our activites. Soon, we found this networking translating into additional support and resources. Some of the Rotary clubs took it upon themselves to collect toothbrushes and toothpaste and then send them our way for redistribution, such as Mt. Martha and Frankston North Rotary clubs. But the support from the Rotary community didn’t stop there, a notable mention goes to the Mt. Eliza Primary School Earlyact club (a version of Rotary/Rotaract for primary schoolers), who also donated a sizable donation of toothbrushes and toothpaste that greatly helped our project.
Some Day One Day
In February 2025, the club received an Instagram message from a Shambhavi Kaushik, from the Rotaract Club of St Xavier’s College, in India. Their club was planning an event where clubs from around the world were invited to do 10 of one type of good action. For example, distribute 10 stationery kits, plant 10 trees, feed 10 people etc. They hoped that making the requirements of the project very achievable would motivate as many clubs worldwide to get involved and maximise impact. We were more than happy to participate and Lily was quick to come up with an idea for what our 10-fold contribution could entail! Lily suggested we use what we have collected from our Toothbrush+ activities to make 10 hand-sewn toiletry bags packed to the brim with items like toothbrushes, sanitary pads, soap, deodorant etc., and then donate these to one of our local Community Support Centres. And so we did just that, having a lot of fun learning new sewing skills form Lily along the way! This international initiative did not just introduce us to our future International Service Director (Shambhavi would end up joining our club from India!), but inspired a whole new direction for Toothbrush+
Toothbrush+ Packed
Currently, we have begun trialling an extension of the original Toothbrush+ project in the form of hygiene bag donations, with this sub-initiative being dubbed ‘Toothbrush+ Packed’. These bags are hand-sewn by Lily with assistance from other club members with second-hand/thrifted fabrics. Here, the aim is to provide supply of hygiene products in a more convenient and comprehensive packed form. Not only that, the bags are have different colourful designs to appeal to different peoples’ tastes, to also give to those who are always thinking about the necessities (food, water, clothes, personal hygiene products) something nice. To restore them with some level of dignity they may have lost along the way and to hopefully make their day just a little bit better.
So far, we have successfully completed drop-offs of our Toothbrush+ Packed bags to the Frankston and Southern Peninsula Community Support Centres, which were both very well received! As such, we hope to continue this and develop the Toothbrush+ Packed initiative into a sustainable ‘spinoff’ project that can be extended to all 4 of our local community support centres, just as the original Toothbrush+ initiative has.
Future Plans
Looking to the future and our aspirations for Toothbrush+, they remain in line with the original goal of this project: To ensure there is a continuous, sustainable supply of critical hygiene products within all Community Support Centres along the Mornington Peninsula and in Frankston that anyone who needs them can access year-round. Therefore, we hope to continue to involve more and more chemists in the local area, with our hand-decorated donation bins waiting to find a home in every pharmacy we can find. All the while, we will keep sewing our colourful bags, and keep pushing to find new ways in which our visions will turn into reality.
