In an attempt to help end period poverty, the OnPeriod club will hold a feminine hygiene drive with the Wellness Box Foundation. The club will collect new and unused pads, tampons, panty liners and women’s underwear from students.

The drive will start on Mar. 6 and continue until Mar. 11. Students will also have the opportunity to help pack wellness bags, curated from products the drive gathers, on Mar. 8 at the Bottega Exchange.

“We’re trying to get as many menstrual products [as possible] so that we can assemble care kits and distribute them to shelters and people that need them. The more they donate, the better,” Secretary Angelina Kong said. “When we get to the Bottega Exchange, we’re going to help set things up and get things organized.”

The Wellness Box Foundation is another student-led nonprofit organization that distributes packages containing period, cosmetic and hygiene products to local women’s shelters. On top of working with them to provide the community with supplies, OnPeriod will utilize the collaboration to help bring awareness to period poverty. 

“One of our main goals is community awareness, we really want to make an impact in Las Vegas. [There’s been a lack of awareness] our whole lives, but the future is now. We want to make a difference if we can,” President Mila Polisano said. “There are so many people struggling with period poverty. One in four teens are faced with this issue and people would really never have guessed that.”

Furthermore, they hope to end the stigma around the topic of discussions about the menstrual cycle.

“I think a lot of it is about gender,” Polisano said. “I feel like if this were happening to boys, there wouldn’t be this stigma around it. It’s this taboo topic that you can’t really talk about because it’s seen as disgusting, but it’s really not. It happens to every single girl out there and it should be normalized.”

OnPeriod hopes that this community event will make an impression on the student body.

“When they go out and actually see what is happening and the amount of good that they will be doing, it will open their eyes to see how much of a big problem this is,” Vice President Sofia Yemane said. “It will also be a good learning experience for them to know what people go through. They need to see it for themselves.”

Being OnPeriod’s first local event, this drive will help expand their community outreach and overall growth as a club.

“We decided to work with the Wellness Box Foundation because we hold them to such a high regard. They’ve just done so much,” Yemane said. “I feel like this was a good opportunity to collaborate with other people our age and learn from them to see how we could better our club.”

They hope that this drive will help make an impact on people’s lives and help the local community of women as a whole.

“So many people feel shame about their periods and it impacts many aspects of their life. A lot of students miss school or work because of their period and I feel like increasing more access to period products can help with that,” Kong said. “We’re distributing the donations to women’s shelters all over Las Vegas. We want to help out the women in our community that don’t have much accessibility to period products.”