During her freshman year of high school, Nadya Okamoto’s mom lost her job and consequently their home. Her family entered what Okamoto calls their “time of transition.” Over the next year, they couch-surfed among some of their closest friends, who have since become more like family.
Okamoto took public transit to get to school. During her two-hour bus trips, Okamoto chatted with homeless people and asked them about challenges they face.
“I think I just wanted to hear about other people’s struggles to take off the stress of what was happening at home,” Okamoto said.
Often, they mentioned that they didn’t have access to menstrual products.
Before the end of her freshman year, Okamoto found herself in an abusive relationship, landing her in a battered women’s shelter for a weekend. During her short stay, she continued to ask homeless women about their struggles.
“Hearing their stories really gave me this privilege check,” Okamoto said. “Like, yeah, my family was struggling but I never had to worry about my period in the way they did.”
So Okamoto decided to leverage her privilege to address the menstrual needs of homeless people. The summer after her sophomore year of high school, she founded Camions of Care, a nonprofit that distributes menstrual products, with her classmate Vincent Forand.
In two years, Camions of Care has grown to serve folks who menstruate worldwide. They partner with 40 nonprofits and have campus branches at 36 universities and high schools.
“There used to be times that we just didn’t have enough menstrual products to give to people,” said Katie O’Brien, community outreach and development officer at Rose Haven, a partnering women’s shelter in Portland. “Now we have enough menstrual supplies for our clients at all times. If you’re not sure how you’re gonna deal with your cycle, it’s hard to deal long-term. It’s such a level of relief and comfort that we can provide that.”
Okamoto doesn’t want to stop at distribution.
“If our organization were to disappear in the next year, no one would remember us,” Okamoto said. “The change we’ve made is inspiration and distribution. I want Camions of Care to make long-term impact.”
She’s pursuing that goal by designing a policy program that empowers campus branches to lobby for legislation that makes menstrual products accessible to everyone.
The program will provide campus branches and partners with email templates, contacts, legislation and a step-by-step guide to initiating policy change.
“I really want it to be so that they just press send,” Okamoto said. “I want to make it as easy as possible for any of our members to make legislative change possible.”
In May, New York state joined the ranks of a handful of states and cities that have abolished the “luxury item” tax (widely known as the tampon tax) on menstrual products.
“We’re looking at the legislation used to abolish the tampon tax in other states and identifying key policymakers and formatting it in an accessible way for people to use,” said Lauren Wu, a University of Washington senior who is helping design the program.
Given these resources, Camions of Care branches can push to abolish the tampon tax in every state and go one step further to ask public institutions to provide menstrual products for free, Wu said.
Lynn Hager, director of community outreach and partnerships for Camions of Care at Portland State University, said this kind of direction is exactly what it would take for their branch to get started on legislative action.
Okamoto hopes to have the policy program ready to go by the end of 2016.
“There’s this perceived barrier that you need to wait until you get a degree or until you get older to make this kind of change,” Okamoto said. “But I think we can start now. There’s no program out there that’s like, here’s everything you need and the exact steps you need to take to do it.”