It offers the one-for-one donation promise: you buy our condoms, and we’ll send them abroad to AIDS prevalent communities.
Who knew doing the deed could also do some global good? Photojournalist Talia Frenkel founded L. after photographing AIDS ridden countries for the Red Cross. Frustrated by the lack of infrastructure emphasizing prevention education and overall in-access to protection from sexually transmitted diseases, Frenkel decided to create a sustainable solution and founded L. Condoms in 2010.
L. offers the one-for-one donation promise: you buy our condoms, and we’ll send them abroad to AIDS prevalent communities. Not only that, but if you’re in San Francisco or LA, a courier will deliver the condom to your doorstep. Yes, “Who ordered the large?”
When it comes to the product, the condoms are designed with women in mind, both Mother Earth – the 100% recycled packaging minimizes paper and ink waste – and the women using the condoms. The condoms are scent free and lubricated with glycerin and paraben-free formulas, benefiting hoo-ha’s all over the world.
So how does your steaming D’Angelo session make change? Clinics in many of the most AIDS affected communities only sometimes offer free condoms, and the market price of a condom is far out of range for the majority of the population. To create the sustainable program she envisioned, Frenkel created partnerships with non-profits in high-impact areas to ensure widespread distribution of the condoms, and created tangent programs to establish preventative education and to promote empowerment, particularly for women.
Their Female Social Enterprise Solutions program trains women as health care professionals, who then earn an income while building sustainable distribution channels. In the long term L. hopes this program will transform the culture of sex and prevention, empowering women to not only advocate for themselves, but to facilitate change in their communities.
Additionally, their Students for Students program caters to American university students in group living, such as Co-ops and Greek houses. L. offers discounts for buying the condoms in bulk, and the condoms are then donated in the name of the house. The Students for Students program in the field emphasizes early action, targeting African students less than twenty years of age, 80% of whom are already sexually active.
Through these embedded programs, the company aims to avoid the label of what many call “parachute aid,” NGOs and companies that offer donations and services to hundreds (or thousands) of communities for short periods of time, meeting numbers but rarely offering any sustainable programs. L. instead directs their aid to the most highly affected areas of Africa, and targets the issue from many angles: education, supplies, and community outreach.
The way we see it, in buying an L. Condom, you’re doing a lot more than sending a rubber overseas — you’re contributing to a multi-faceted outreach program we believe has a lot of potential.
So wrap it up, and do some good.
Check out ThisisL.com for more information.
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