When Brent King showed up at the Calgary Mustard Seed in 2008 asking how he could help, he discovered there was a dire need for men’s underwear.
The following year, the Calgary-based biomedical engineer and entrepreneur started GotGinch, a cross-Canada underwear drive that to date has seen over 100,000 pairs of underwear delivered to homeless shelters across the country.
King and Robb Price, founder of charitable-giving website DeliverGood.org, are hitting the road again this year, driving over 7,000 kilometres from Vancouver to Halifax in an RV to deliver 35,000 pairs of men’s underwear to 10 homeless shelters.
“Most of these shelters that we’ve chosen are focused on transitioning people off the street and becoming productive people in society,” says King.
“To do that the first step is to try to rebuild self-esteem and a sense of dignity in the person—underwear is a really good start to that.”
This year, King and Price will be joined for the first time by Gabriela Ostendorfer who, inspired by the GotGinch story, started Need Knickers to provide women’s underwear to shelters. Need Knickers will deliver 5,000 pairs of women’s underwear to five of the shelters from Vancouver to Regina.
“Every year we get the same question: ‘What about women?’ A couple of guys travelling across Canada with a van-load of women’s underwear seems a little creepy, so we’ve always stuck to men’s,” King says.
“We’ve always said if we could find a lady that would step up and be involved, and be the face of the women’s initiative, we would help them in any way we could. Need Knickers is an exciting addition to the program.”
