The Importance of Women’s Health. Period.
Roughly two billion women menstruate every month, according to the National Institutes for Health. “At a given point each day,” their report states, “800 million women and girls menstruate, comprising 26% of the global population.”
If you are one of them and living in the U.S., chances are you have what you need for a safe and healthy period. Clean water. Sanitation and hygienic facilities. Education. And affordable, safe period products.
But one in three adults—and one in four students—in the U.S. lack access to the essentials to manage this basic need. Globally, more than 35 percent of the world’s women and girls have periods without necessities or dignity in cultures where menstruation is cloaked in shame.
This past year, Hollins University launched a multi-pronged, student-led advocacy campaign to tackle this public health crisis known as period poverty. Hollins Against Period Poverty Initiative (HAPPI) is a collaboration among students and faculty, the Hollins University Black Alumnae group, and the international nonprofit Youth Advocates Programs, Inc. (YAP). HAPPI benefits YAP’s sister agency, the Sierra Leone Youth Advocate Program (SLYAP), with menstrual supplies and financial support. HAPPI is shedding light on the issue of period poverty abroad, in the U.S., and even on the Hollins campus.
HAPPI started by happenstance. One day in summer 2023, Shaneka Bynum ’07, an active member of the Hollins Black Alumnae group and new Alumnae Board member, was doing what she does every day: texting her Hollins friends. As Anna Koranteng ’05 texted about her recent trip to Ghana, she commented on the high cost of menstrual products there. Bynum recalls thinking, “For real?” Period poverty, Koranteng tapped into the text, was a huge issue in Ghana.
Eager to learn more, Bynum started her self-education at YAP, where she is the national director for employee development. She learned that thousands of women and girls in Sierra Leone lack period products, water, and hygienic facilities, the impact of which lasts well beyond a few days each month. School-aged girls must miss school while menstruating and fall behind in their studies. SLYAP endeavors to provide them with knowledge and options for a dignified, safe menstrual cycle.
Bynum knew that partnering with YAP to bring awareness to period poverty was a great opportunity for Hollins. Ramona Kirsch, Ed.D., the university’s director of global learning, needed no convincing. “Hollins has a long history of advancing women’s empowerment and addressing inequities. Collaborating with an international nonprofit fosters a dynamic exchange needed to create global change,” says Kirsch. To get the initiative off the ground, Kirsch tapped Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies Lindsey Breitwieser and Assistant Professor and Chair of Public Health Abubakarr Jalloh. Frequent collaborators, the three were already planning Hollins’ first-ever Short Term trip to Kenya to study reproductive health in January 2024, thanks to a grant they had from the U.S. Department of States’ Diversify Education Abroad for US Students (IDEAS) program.
Breitwieser added period poverty into her Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) course in fall 2023, and it was there that HAPPI took shape. “Developing HAPPI was part of the students’ work products for the course, giving them experience in nonprofit organization, project management, research, and (some) public speaking,” explains Breitweiser. The students devised the name, developed HAPPI’s priorities and activities, and researched the topic in depth.
For Jalloh, HAPPI is the perfect Venn diagram. Born and raised in Sierra Leone, he researches social determinants of health and health equity, health disparities, and multicultural health within the context of global health. Prior to coming to Hollins, he worked on women’s health projects such as female genital circumcision in West Africa and gender equality initiatives. Throughout the fall, Breitwieser, Bynum, Jalloh, Kirsch, and YAP leaders continued to meet virtually and speak to Breitweiser’s students as they developed HAPPI.
In February, HAPPI’s awareness campaign kicked into gear, fittingly, just as the six students who accompanied Breitwieser and Jalloh to Kenya for Short Term returned to campus. In Kenya, the group studied the impact of community, medical, and legal influences on reproductive health care and justice. Their experience and deepened perspective of health care access and inequities in Africa added to HAPPI discussions.
Last January, students traveled to Kenya with Director of Global Learning Ramona Kirsch, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies Lindsey Breitwieser, and Assistant Professor and Chair of Public Health Abubakarr Jalloh. Their 17-day journey, in collaboration with Kenyatta University, aimed to “foster a global perspective on healthcare needs, access, and medical practice as our students explore social, scientific, and juridical influences on sexual and reproductive life.” Kirsch is hoping to organize a similar January Short Term experience in Sierra Leone in the coming years. To read more about their trip to Kenya last January, visit kenya.hollins.edu.
On February 16, Breitwieser and HAPPI students led a workshop at Hollins’ 2024 Leading Equity, Diversity, and Justice Conference (Leading EDJ) on the global issue of period poverty. They discussed the social stigma, inaccessibility, and the cost of menstrual supplies abroad, which led to an illuminating conversation about period poverty closer to home.
Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies Lindsey Breitwieser (standing at podium) presents at the 2024 Leading Equity, Diversity, and Justice Conference in February. The students standing with her were involved in HAPPI and researched issues around period poverty in Sierra Leone.
At Leading EDJ, students shared that Hollins students often lack access to products, a reality affecting more students than many realize in colleges and universities across the country. In 2021, the National Center on Safe and Supportive Learning Environments noted that over 14 percent of students who menstruate could not afford products at some point in the previous year. Other more recent studies suggest the percentage of students who can’t afford menstrual products is 20-25 percent.
The school bookstore no longer stocks period supplies. Not everyone has a car to drive to the store, and the half-mile walk down Williamson Road to CVS is far from ideal. Purchasing menstrual care products—a box of pads or tampons costs $6 to $8—can be a financial burden.
HAPPI member Charvi Gangwani ’24 [See Q&A] was part of that discussion. “Hollins is predominantly composed of menstruating individuals, and it’s worth noting that 100% of admitted undergraduate students receive some form of scholarships or financial aid,” she says. Free menstrual products alleviate financial stressors and disruptions to school or classes, she adds, citing studies that show a link between period poverty and increased rates of depression.
“There are people who have to decide [whether] to buy groceries or menstrual products. That’s the conversation,” Bynum says of an inequity that continues beyond campuses around the country. “Many of us are seasoned in our careers and well-established and are forgetting that part. Millions of menstruating people must make that decision. And that shouldn’t be a decision that people have to make.”
Kirsch concurs: “One of the things that came out of the Leading EDJ discussion is that people on our campus now realize that period poverty isn’t something that’s distant. It’s the reality of some people at Hollins.”
The Hollins Public Health Outreach Club, advised by Jalloh, placed period product collection boxes across campus. Donated tampons will stock the Hollins period pantries [see sidebar], while all other collected products will be sent to SLYAP. Tampons, Jalloh explains, cannot be shipped to Sierra Leone due to socio-cultural inappropriateness. The club also streamed an educational video on period poverty at the Mean Girls movie night sponsored by the Hollins Activity Board and educated Hollins students at the popular bingo night. HAPPI also collected products during the 2024 Reunion Weekend.
HAPPI’s social media campaign, designed and run by Celeste Landry Hernandez ’24, kicked off in April and culminated on Menstrual Hygiene Day on May 28, an annual day to bring awareness to menstrual health. Landry Herandez is the first Hollins intern for YAP, a position Kirsch suggested to bridge the gap between YAP and Hollins by having a YAP representative on campus. A double major in gender and women’s studies and international relations, Landry Hernandez was mentored by Bynum and worked virtually from Hollins.
Her internship focused on digital media and graphic design—she created the HAPPI logo and several infographics, which she translated into Spanish. She also participated in the Short Term to Kenya, an experience that fueled her longtime passion for reproductive justice work. While in high school in Nepal, she was part of the student-led PLUM (Please Learn and Understand Menstruation) to destigmatize menstrual taboos and provide homemade kits for girls across Kathmandu. The kits include reusable, homemade, safe, and sanitary products, educational materials (in Nepali and English), and sanitary dos and don’ts to distribute to local communities and schools.
During annual service trips to rural parts of the country focused on community development for local schools, PLUM members prepared hundreds of kits and created informational classroom binders about puberty and menstruation to be shared by Nepali-speaking students.
“In certain regions of Nepal, when a woman is menstruating, she cannot cook,” Landry Hernandez explains of Chaupadi, the widespread (though legally banned) practice. “Chaupadi is mainly practiced in the far western and midwestern parts of the country where for the entirety of a woman’s period, she lives in a hut isolated from her family because she is ‘unclean’ and ‘intouchable.’ Over the last several decades, there have been multiple deaths as a result of Chaupadi, as the conditions in these huts are often unsanitary, tightly closed, dark spaces with little ventiliation.”
Because of remote learning her first two years at Hollins and working on her senior thesis, Landry Hernandez hadn’t done a lot of reproductive justice work during college. She was considering another on-campus internship until Career and Life Design at Hollins mentioned the new YAP internship. Turns out, she’s as passionate about graphic design and content curation as she is about destigmatizing menstruation. “One of the most rewarding aspects of this internship has really been the creative freedom that’s been granted to me,” says Landry Hernandez. “This is a full-circle moment because in high school, I was doing [period poverty] work. And at the end of my college career, I’m right back kind of where I started. I love doing this—it really fuels me.”
“HAPPI allows us to think globally but act locally,” Kirsch says. “We’re connected with YAP, doing initiatives and raising awareness here, but also talking with others around the world about this through YAP’s International Peer Forum.” Each month, YAP convenes a virtual forum with its global partners around a topic. On March 28, Gangwani and Ti-Shawn Willington ’25 represented HAPPI, with Breitwieser moderating the event that included participants from ten countries.
“It was so inspiring to learn more about their experiences, thoughts, and perspectives on the social perceptions of periods, available resources, and the supportive environments to aid menstruating individuals to manage periods without embarrassment or stigma,” Gangwani says. “[The forum] provided me with multiple perspectives and reinforced my beliefs that while there is much work to be done, there is a strong global community committed to driving positive change.”
What’s next for HAPPI? This past summer, Bynum, Kirsch, Jalloh, Breitwieser, and YAP leadership continued to build out HAPPI’s infrastructure with the goal of facilitating a student organization moving forward. Breitwieser is completing a comprehensive, global educational period toolkit that can be used by YAP with background on period poverty, maps of the continents with findings and facts, a glossary of reproductive health terms, ideas on getting started with local assessment and organizing, how-tos on empathy, and more. Other toolkits, she discovered, are too generic and focus primarily on period product donation and distribution. “[That’s] fantastic and necessary, but period poverty is a multidimensional issue that requires not just attention to what supplies are or are not available, but also plumbing and waste management infrastructure, sex education policies, stigmatization of bodily functions and blood, and gender-based violence,” Breitwieser explains. The HAPPI toolkit offers a full scope of the problem to empower readers to identify problems in their communities and organize to create change.
She and Jalloh also are researching possible grants for HAPPI, with a dream of a larger reproductive justice lab at Hollins. The group is also researching the feasibility of a period-poverty-focused Short Term trip to Sierra Leone in conjunction with SLYAP and a local university.
The topic of period poverty will continue in Breitwieser’s introductory course, fostering new advocates and HAPPI leadership. “I witness students’ commitment to public engagement, responsible citizenship, and human rights advocacy daily,” Breitwieser reflects. “I am so proud of the work our students have done this year to bring HAPPI to life and to raise awareness about the personal and political impacts of period poverty locally and globally.”
Bynum is looking forward to mentoring what she hopes is a long line of Hollins YAP interns and is working to connect smaller nonprofits to HAPPI. “When we think about the legislative impact we can have, there’s power in numbers,” she says. “I’m also thinking about our sister colleges to make it an even bigger conversation.”
“This semester laid the foundations for what I can only hope will be a really strong and long-lasting collaboration between Hollins and YAP, which speaks to broader collaborative power of NGOs and historically women’s colleges,” adds Landry Hernandez, who hopes to work for a nonprofit that advocates for menstrual health before attending graduate school.
For Jalloh, he remains excited about the focus on such a critical global health issue, particularly one affecting his home country, and how it has galvanized his students in his adopted one. “I strongly believe in youth empowerment and advocacy, which includes having them sit at the table and be part of the decision-making process and implementation of this important global health issue,” he says. “Our plan is to make this initiative one that will continue to generate sustainable change both here on the Hollins campus and around the world.”
Sarah Achenbach ’88 is a freelance writer living in Baltimore.
