When my co-founder and I started working on PERIOD, our mission was to serve 20 homeless women a week in downtown Portland, Oregon. We would raise money, buy period products, create period care packages, and distribute them to local shelters. Naturally, as Gen Z teenagers , we posted on social media to share what we were doing. Our goal was small at first — we wanted to mobilize people in our own community to start talking about periods and potentially join our volunteering events. Within a few months, we had hundreds of messages from students and journalists around the country asking how they could get involved and bring our work to their city. Our most common message went something like, “We’ve never thought about periods before as a need, but now that we think about it, of course it is a need!”