How Masks for Everyone was Founded

This started out as a concern –common to all of us during this time– and escalated when I received a call from my dear friend, Joyce Rankin, who heads up the nurses looking after the homeless with Street Health (there are 7000 Homeless in Toronto). She was crying "We need masks!".

The hospitals, for now, have masks, but the front line workers and other care facilities do not. I have been sending her masks, supplies and anything else I can since that call.

I then started to recruit people to make masks with filters, and have set up multiple sewers through my own resources and the help of people like Vicky Milner, Lea Greenwood, Christopher Paunil, Michael Zoffraneri, Margaret Daligadu and many more.

We have been using 1500 Fitrate Anti-Allergen air filters (removing them from their wire casings). There is no proof that this type of filter paper is the best, but a filter may be better than no filter at all.

Ann Kaplan