The film, which was created by Oakwood High School students in North Hollywood who also founded a nonprofit organization called The Pad Project, which aims to fight the stigma of menstruation. The program initially focused in a rural village outside of Delhi, India.
For decades, the women there didn’t have access to pads, which resulted in health problems and girls missing school or dropping out entirely. But when a sanitary pad machine was installed in the village, the women learned to manufacture and market their own pads. The ladies felt so inspired that they named their brand Fly because they want women “to soar.”
“When we started this project, we really had no idea how far it would come,” Avery Siegel, Period’s executive producer and former Oakwood High School student.
Siegel and her classmates Ruby Schiff and Claire Sliney’s efforts started almost six years ago with simple fundraisers in their Los Angeles community.
The students raised money via bake sales and a yoga-thon. They promoted via word-of-mouth to raise funds for the project and in October of 2016 launched a Kickstarter campaign.
Talking about periods and having these women work on the machine makes people comfortable with the discussion. Women in the village felt better about themselves and even the men in the village noticed a change in the community’s attitudes.
No comments:
Post a Comment