Periods with Pride leads another successful drive
Periods with Pride, a club at NPHS, recently had a holiday drive from Dec. 13-17, right before winter break.
Himani Pothulu, junior and co-president, describes the club as a part of a larger organization that focuses on collecting and donating menstrual products. “It’s actually a branch, like a local leader program off of the official organization, the nonprofit Periods with Pride. We are a club that focuses on collecting and donating menstrual products to organizations and individuals in need and we stress advocating for menstrual equity and trying to speak against menstrual poverty and trying to help that cause,“ Pothulu said.
Aarya Bhat, junior and co-president, described the club’s most recent drive as successful, with more than 750 items being donated. “We collected almost over 750 products…I believe it was successful but I do know we could do better because, in last year’s drive, we collected almost a thousand products in one of our collaboration drives with our other local leader program at Westlake High School,” Bhat said.
Bhat believes the donation events are the most successful when there are multiple schools and multiple locations. “Just having two schools on it and we had three locations because when we have drives just for our school, we are only able to do it out of the school, but doing a collaboration drive, we can have three high schools…we also contacted Thousand Oaks high school and asked them to leave a box out so we were able to collect a lot more products,” Bhat said.
Marisa Canepa, junior and club member, looks forward to the meetings and events in the future. “I just really look forward to the drives and the meetings that come before the drives because the meetings are always fun and educational. It’s a really good way for us to sit and make the care packages and make the cards and talk to other people,” Canepa said.
As it stands now, Periods with Pride is an extremely successful club that welcomes anyone and everyone. Pothulu says everyone who might be interested is able to join. “Everyone who is interested is able to join…[If someone is interested] they can ask Mrs. Lockwood in D3. We have a Remind set up, they can contact any one of us, we always give out Remind messages information about the club. Remind would be the best way to join the club,” Pothulu said.
