OU WHA educates community on period poverty, sexual health | News

Sitting inside a room in the OU Physical Sciences Center, the advocacy chairs of Women’s Health Advocacy sorted through menstrual product donations and placed them into piles. 

Plastic bins were passed around, each member adding tampons and pads in an assembly line. They decorated the bins with drawings of flowers and hearts, adding a sticker with a QR code on the front linking to information about the organization and how to get a free menstrual cup.

The next day, the bins were taken to the seven stations in restrooms around campus and left for students and faculty to use for free. 

At one station, the bin was cleaned out within hours.

At another, a professor left a note thanking Women’s Health Advocacy for providing the free products, saying the station saved her in an emergency. 

“It’s so needed,” said Hudia Jamshed, one of the founders of Women’s Health Advocacy, spearheaded the menstrual product stations project.

“I just wanted to make an impact on campus that was bigger than myself. I didn’t know what that would look like, but that’s what I wanted to do,” Jamshed said.

And that’s what they did.

Five years after WHA was founded in 2019, the organization has grown to have over 450 members, including 44 executive officers, dedicated to eradicating period poverty in Norman by routinely filling over 80 menstrual stations across campus and the city.

The organization has donated over $40,000 worth of menstrual products to OU’s Norman campus, which has nearly 27,000 students, including almost 15,000 students who identify as female — in just three years.

“It gives me a lot of hope that this small organization that some people didn’t think was going to continue on is so huge now,” Jamshed said. “(It) is making such an impact.”

How it began

Originally called the OU Breast Cancer Foundation created by then-OU student Joy Lee, WHA was founded when Lee decided to broaden the organization to include all aspects of women’s reproductive health after conducting research with Mauricio Carvallo, a professor in the department of psychology, on sexual and reproductive stigma and health literacy.

Lee talked to her close friend, Jamshed, about her idea and together the two registered WHA as a student organization in 2019. Around 30 members joined WHA when it was first founded. 

Soon after, they began placing menstrual product stations around campus. Jamshed, who served as vice president of advocacy, said she was inspired to start the project after seeing a donation basket in one of the Cate Center buildings with free items such as ramen packets and menstrual products for students to take.

“I was like, this is a basic hygienic need, so why isn’t this all over campus?” Jamshed said.

Jamshed applied for a project grant from PERIOD. — a global nonprofit working to eradicate period poverty and stigma through advocacy, education and service — which provided initial funding for the menstrual product stations. Jamshed and Lee then started collaborating with different organizations across campus for product donations, such as the Gamma Phi Beta sorority. 

Jamshed and Lee created a liaison initiative that designated WHA members to refill the stations periodically. By the end of her senior year, Jamshed said there were around 12 stations across campus. 

However, Lee and Jamshed said they wanted the organization to provide not just menstrual products, but educational resources to the OU community as well. 

“Especially in Oklahoma, it’s just so sad how terrible our sexual reproductive health literacy is,” Lee said. “A lot of people I’ve talked to, even in college, never had any sex ed.”

According to SIECUS Sex Education for Social Change, Oklahoma schools are not required to teach sex education, and instead must primarily instruct on abstinence. However, schools are required to provide HIV and AIDS prevention instruction and health education. 

Both Lee and Jamshed grew up in conservative cities in Oklahoma and cultures they said shied away from talking about reproductive and sexual health. They wanted to provide a safe space for people to ask questions and openly discuss these topics, where they did not have one. 

They decided to organize WHA into the advocacy and education committees, which would host monthly educational sessions focused on different subjects within reproductive and sexual health. 

“I kind of grew up in a culture and society that didn’t really talk about women’s health until you absolutely needed to,” Jamshed said. “I wanted to be able to give others the opportunity through the work that I did, which is what made me really passionate about it.”

Every month, Jamshed and Lee would see more people attend the educational sessions, and the number of WHA members only continued to grow.

Jamshed and Lee handed the organization to the next group of leaders before their senior year. They graduated from OU in 2021 and are now students at OU Health Sciences Center pursuing careers in medicine.

Last year, they started placing menstrual product stations across OUHSC.

The growth of WHA

Kylie Hutchison, a 2023 OU graduate, took over as president of WHA and, along with Vice President of Advocacy Aarya Ghonasgi and Vice President of Education Stacey Johnson, founded WHA as a nonprofit in 2021.

In 2022, Hutchison worked with the other WHA officers to join the global organization PERIOD. to become the official PERIOD. chapter at OU. 

Hutchison represented Oklahoma as a PERIOD. community organizer and helped draft legislation to reduce period poverty in the state, such as Senate Bill 1499 which was introduced in February 2022 and coauthored by Senators Jessica Garvin (R-Duncan) and Cynthia Roe (R-Lindsay). 

Period poverty refers to the lack of access to safe and hygienic menstrual products during monthly periods and inaccessibility to menstrual hygiene education. A 2021 BioMed Central Women’s Health national survey found 10% of all female college students are unable to afford menstrual products each month.

SB 1499 would have created the Feminine Hygiene Program, which included a revolving fund administered by the State Department of Health to provide free feminine hygiene products to low-income women, and a refundable sales tax exemption for menstrual products. The bill died in the House.

According to the Alliance for Period Supplies, one in five women between the ages of 12 and 44 live below the federal poverty line in Oklahoma. The average menstruator spends about $20 on menstrual hygiene products per cycle, amounting to about $18,000 over their lifetime. 

But while this legislation failed, Hutchison and the others at WHA continued efforts to alleviate period poverty at OU and across Norman.

During Hutchison’s presidency, the number of menstrual stations on campus increased from about 12 to over 70 stations, with at least one in each academic building at OU Norman. 

To manage the increase, Hutchison and the WHA officers decided to split the advocacy committee into two, creating a service subcommittee that was solely responsible for refilling the menstrual stations weekly.

WHA hosts an annual Greek Wars menstrual product donation drive to help fill the stations. For two weeks, sororities and fraternities across campus compete to donate the most amount of products to WHA. 

This fall, Greek Wars donated over 15,000 menstrual products to WHA.

“Period poverty is not going to be solved until there’s legislative change on a state level and on a national level,” Hutchison said. “But being able to help alleviate some of the struggles that some people are facing in their day-to-day lives, and being able to tangibly see that difference happen, I had never done work like that before.”

During her final year as president of WHA, Hutchison and the WHA officers held the first Menstrual Met Gala, which she said served as an opportunity to spread awareness about period poverty and other issues in health care. 

“That was definitely like a peak happiness moment,” Hutchison said.

Continuing the mission

Emily Carr, a sociology and criminal justice senior, joined WHA her junior year after seeing one of the menstrual product stations in a restroom. She started as a liaison and helped fill the product stations around campus. A semester later, she became an advocacy officer. 

Now, Carr is wrapping up her year as president of the organization, during which she oversaw the creation of several new initiatives within WHA. 

In September, WHA launched Flow on the Go, free and customizable monthly period supply kits that can be ordered by OU students, staff and faculty. Flow on the Go kits include products such as tampons, pads, liners, period underwear and menstrual cups. WHA has provided nearly 150 period kits through this service. 

In November, they announced the Community Cycles initiative, which installed free menstrual product stations at housing programs in Norman, including Transition House, Crossroads Youth and Family Services and Bridges of Norman. 

A few months later, WHA began a partnership with Norman High School to provide free menstrual products to high school students. WHA placed seven stations in the school’s restrooms, which are refilled one to two times a month depending on need. 

In late January, WHA partnered with It’s On Us and Students for Reproductive Justice to create free “Just-In-Case Kits,” which include Plan B pills, condoms and pregnancy tests and can be ordered by OU community members. Since it was launched, over 200 kits have been ordered. 

“There definitely is a need,” Carr said. “It just makes me want to keep working harder to give more. I feel like there’s always a new thing or another resource we could be giving.”

Carr said one of her favorite projects is Pads for Prisons, a fundraiser WHA holds each November to buy menstrual products to donate to the Eddie Warrior and Mabel Bassett correctional facilities. In November, Carr took a class in Mabel Bassett through the OU Sociology Department and was able to talk to women inside the facility about their experiences with menstrual hygiene. 

“It was so humbling to hear their experience, one, with menstruation, but also just general hygiene,” Carr said. “They have to buy all their menstrual hygiene products and a lot of them don’t have money for it. So they will just free bleed through clothes that they can’t wash adequately, and it’s just very degrading.”

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 38 states have no laws mandating that incarcerated women be given menstrual products while housed in correctional facilities, including Oklahoma. Facilities in states that do often supply low-quality products or not enough. 

“It makes me want to work harder to get more products to get to more people,” Carr said.

During her presidency, Carr worked to carry on WHA’s traditions, including hosting the second annual Menstrual Met Gala, while creating new initiatives to move the organization forward.  

In the five years since it was founded, the organization has grown tremendously. With an established office, holding shelves stocked with packages of tampons and pads, members no longer haul bags of products to an apartment clubhouse to sort into bins. 

The service subcommittee is now its own committee, with around 26 officers dedicated to refilling nearly 100 stations across campus and Norman. 

But while the organization has changed, its mission remains the same: fight to end period poverty.

“There’s always more need, there’s always students needing it,” Carr said. “We’re doing it for a reason.”

Applications for WHA’s 2024-25 general executive team are open and are due by 11:59 p.m. Monday.

This story was edited by Anusha Fathepure and Peggy Dodd. Grace Rhodes copy edited this story.