Two Green Hope students are putting free pads in North Carolina restrooms

The hardware for ending period poverty in a school bathroom costs between $13 and $15. Period Project NC has built an entire nonprofit around that fact.

The group was founded by students at Green Hope High School in Cary, North Carolina. Its website dates the project to 2021 and names its founders as Sarah and Rose, while ABC11 identifies the founders as Farah Rosaleen and Sarah Pazokian. Either way, the mission is the same: supply free pads and panty liners in school restrooms.

The numbers in ABC11’s October 2023 report show how far a small idea can travel. Dispensers were in 14 schools across the state, restocked by 120 student ambassadors. The program began at Green Hope, spread to Charlotte and Durham, and had just entered its first middle school. The project’s own site currently lists 6 schools, 78 bathrooms and more than 10,000 students reached, and the figures do not match, so treat any single total with care.

The economics are the clever part. The dispensers run about $200 per school, and stocking a school for a year costs about $700, with products donated. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction funded the work for two school years through a feminine hygiene products grant program, and the founders have been lobbying lawmakers for permanent funding.

Demand has been the easy part. “People are reaching out to us because it shows that there’s a need in their school,” Pazokian told ABC11. Rosaleen, asked about the problem, said: “It has such a simple fix.”

A principal quoted in the report said the program takes away the embarrassment and stigma of needing products. That is the part budgets rarely capture. A pad in the restroom is also a quiet message that the school expected you to need one.

North Carolina is hardly the only state to see this fight. ABC11 notes that 25 states and Washington, D.C., have passed laws providing free period products in schools. These two students are working on the rest.