October 1, 2025
Jonathan Haukaas/jonathan@thereflector.com Battle Ground City Councilor Cherish DesRochers has committed to drive into Portland, pick up 200 premade feminine hygiene product kits and deliver them to Battle Ground Public School’s Family and Community Resource Center (FCRC) in Brush Prairie, for as long as there is a need. Awhile back DesRochers heard rumblings in the area about there being a high demand, but a low supply, of feminine hygiene products available to girls in the Battle Ground school district. Many times that void was filled by district staff, like nurses buying it themselves, said Martha Bellcoff, Family Resource Services Specialist at FCRC. DesRochers founded and is president of Food with Friends, whose goal is combating homelessness in the community by helping connect the homeless with various resources fit to their needs. She thought providing feminine hygiene products could be a good opportunity for Food with Friends to help local youth and started doing more research and found an organization based in Portland called Period. Period. was founded in 2014 and supplies feminine hygiene product kits to girls and women in need, primarily through campus chapters at high schools and universities. “After learning what the possibilities were, I really started to think
Jonathan Haukaas / jonathan@thereflector.com Food with Friends, a homeless outreach nonprofit serving Clark County, today received 5,000 pairs of socks from a national nonprofit called Bombas. Bombas was launched in 2013 after one of the founders heard that socks are the most requested item in homeless shelters. Working with their giving partners, Bombas staff said they designed a sock that requires fewer washings thanks to a antimicrobial treatment and lasts longer with reinforced seams. Bombas operates under a one-for-one business model: a pair of socks is donated to the homeless each time pair of Bombas socks are purchased. Food with Friends was founded by Battle Ground City Councilor Cherish DesRochers and her friend Jamie Spinelli, an outreach case manager at Community Service Northwest. Along with bringing food, toiletries, clothes, and other supplies to the homeless, they do volunteer screening and training for emergency shelters and run a coordinated outreach hotline. Earlier this year they expanded their efforts by launching the Shower Outreach Project, offering free showers via portable showers they park around the county. DesRochers said a lack of clean socks is a continual problem they see. “One I didn’t realize entirely until we started the SOP (Shower Outreach Project),”
Helping people is Cherish DesRochers’ passion. It shows in her day job as a C-TRAN Customer Service Representative. And it shows in the way she spends her time off the clock. DesRochers is the founder of Food With Friends, a local nonprofit organization that provides assistance to homeless people in the community. That means street outreach, serving food, distributing donated items or connecting people with other services and organizations. Sometimes, it means something as simple as a hug. The mission of Food With Friends is connecting with people on more than just a superficial level, DesRochers says. It’s forming relationships, she says, and meeting people where they are without judgment. DesRochers and other volunteers see many of the same people serving food every Saturday night in downtown Vancouver, for example, and know dozens by name. That human contact and connection can be hard to come by on the street, she says. More recently, Food With Friends has added another initiative to its list: the Shower Outreach Project. When a well-used public shower closed last year, DesRochers and others began looking for ways to fill an important, yet often overlooked need. Eventually they got connected with a person who had a