In the November 2025 issue…

• Grantee of the Month: Showers of Blessing

• Membership Corner: Options for Giving!

• Thanks to Our Sponsors Who Help Us Change Lives!

Most of us enjoy hot showers as part of our everyday routine. We do not need to worry about how we will bathe each day. But for our unhoused neighbors, access to hygiene facilities can be a major challenge. Showers of Blessing helps solve this problem by operating mobile showers for people experiencing homelessness.

Showers of Blessing tows its two mobile showers to six sites throughout southern Santa Barbara County. The Women’s Fund grant of $75,000 will be used to purchase a new 2026 Isuzu truck base to replace the current, aging, diesel truck. The existing truck body will be fitted to the new base. This approach will save money and allow Showers of Blessing to retain convenient storage compartments used for transporting shower and cleaning supplies.

Showers of Blessing's new truck and team. Left to right: Martin (shower team), Tracy (volunteer), Ann (board president), Sandy (volunteer), David (shower site manager)

The services provided by Showers of Blessing are critical to the health of their clients. Research shows that regular showering is the best way to avoid skin problems, bodily pests, colds and flu, and more serious infections like staph and MRSA. In addition to providing free hot showers, Showers of Blessing offers clients fresh towels, toiletries (skin products, toothpaste and brushes, dental floss, eye drops, combs, and hairbrushes), new socks and underwear, donated clothing, and a sack lunch. Clients also receive on-site services from partner agencies including Doctors Without Walls, county health nurses, Good Samaritan, City Net, and Adam’s Angels. The agency provides 7,000 showers each year to clients in Isla Vista, Goleta, Santa Barbara, and Carpinteria.

Mary and Robert regularly visit Santa Barbara Showers of Blessing. The couple was evicted from their apartment more than a year ago when California’s pandemic eviction moratorium expired. Now they live in their car. Mary and Robert work as house cleaners, but they have not yet been able to find housing they can afford. They are continuing to use the services offered by Showers of Blessing while they wait for a low-income apartment to become available.

Showers of Blessing provides clients like Mary and Robert with free access to hot showers, connection to other service providers, companionship, and improved health. According to one Showers of Blessing client, “It’s amazing how much better a single shower can make you feel.”

• Contributed by Holly Carmody

As with all years, this one brought great triumphs and heartbreaking losses. Turmoil echoes from across the world to right here in our own backyard, filling our TV screens and phones. If you’re like me, you begin to look inward and ask what can we do for those who are suffering in our local community? How do we stand up and help in a meaningful way? We feel both an obligation and an opportunity to aid our community now more than ever. Because we can, and because we must.

As a member of the Women’s Fund, we unite our philanthropic hearts and financial gifts to support organizations that create real, lasting change in our community. Did you know that we now have more than 1,400 members? That’s thanks to you—all of you who pour your passion into this organization and bring friends and family along.

This year, give the gift of a Women’s Fund membership to someone in your life who wants to create change alongside us. Handbags wear out, candles melt, and jewelry gets lost—but helping a community that so deeply needs us? In the words of the old advertisement: it’s priceless.

Click here to gift a membership. You can find the same page by visiting womensfundsb.org and navigating to Join > Gift a Membership.

• Contributed by Hannah Robinson

In this season of giving thanks, we are grateful for so many things: our 1,400 members, the $12.9 million that we’ve donated to the community over the past two decades, and all the heroic volunteers who help keep our organization humming.  

These are the organizations that sponsored us in 2025. They value your support, so please thank them when you have the chance.

© 2022 Women's Fund of Santa Barbara
A tax-exempt nonprofit organization | Tax ID 82-5169678

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