SAN ANTONIO – Two years ago, Dhiyasri Thirumurugan and Anvi Jakatimath noticed the girls’ bathrooms at Basis San Antonio – Shavano Campus didn’t have dispensers with female menstrual items.
The sophomores started a petition to get dispensers into all three campus bathrooms and find funding in the school budget to ensure they are stocked.
Their program — Cycles for Change — aims to have long-term sustainability.
“These are restocked weekly — more than 400 girls benefit from this,” Jakatimath said.
The girls are making changes beyond their campus. They recently teamed up with Days for Girls International to sew and ship reusable menstrual pads to impoverished communities in Africa.
They also have a podcast called Empower HerFlow, which they started to empower others and themselves to not be shy when talking about periods.
“We come from cultures where periods are very stigmatized, and I really wanted to break that stigma,” Thirumurugan said. “What we’re working on the podcast is, like, discussing how period poverty is being affected in different spheres of the world.”
Since starting Cycles for Change, the girls have emailed other school districts to encourage them to include menstrual product purchases into their annual budgets as well.
“We are hoping to expand to policy changes so that we know that this is going to be implemented in our schools near us, and we want to reach out to representatives, politicians, to make sure that this can be something sustainable in our schools,” Jakatimath said.
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