A small challenge: If you still watch the kind of TV with commercials, count the number of commercials you see for period products. Compared to the other products people would classify as a basic need, the number will be a low one.
The lack of openness in society about the need women have for period products affects those in poverty the most, according to The Flow Initiative founder Eiko La Boria.
Now partnered with Cynthia Vazquez, The Flow Initiative is a nonprofit organization in which the two women are working together to address period poverty and gender equity in Jersey City.
“Serious poverty creates a lack of access of to period products for women,” La Boria said. “(Vazquez) and I, through various workshops and surveys, have found that there’s a big problem in this area in Jersey City, where 28 percent of high school girls surveyed said they have missed school due to their period and a lack of period products, and the national average is 20 percent.”
Statistics like this and research La Boria did previously is what got Vazquez on board and makes both women feel like they’re on the right track.
According to their research, “17.1% of the population in Hudson County live in poverty. The national average is 13.1%. The largest demographic living in poverty are females 25-34 followed by females 35-44.
“‘Period poverty'? Vasquez recalled saying. “‘That exists in our area?’ I just assumed that would only exist in a third-world country, and when (La Boria) showed me her research I was really surprised.”
With #theflowproject, the two Jersey City residents have found a way to turn period products into a canvas for their cause.
“As a writer I knew that we needed to create a platform where we could show a pad or sanity napkin as canvas for art, as a way to normalize it and bring attention to poverty,” La Boria said. “(Vasquez) and I, we discussed this and we thought, hey about how creating a kind of challenge where people create with the pads and then challenge others ... and at the same time there’s a donation, which is an in-kind donation of a period project, so that people know that there money is going directly to fix the need of the community.”
It’s a part of the The Flow Initiative they just launched recently, Vasquez said.
They’re hoping to be able to work within social distancing guidelines with a gallery to have an exhibition sometime in August.
Though the The Flow Initiative hopes to be able to help anyone in Jersey City who needs period products, there’s a big gap between the areas of the city with the most poverty and those at the top of the income-earnings. Still, among that La Boria said it can be more complicated.
La Boria and Vazquez were on Martin Luther King Drive recently. “As we were handing out products we were taking a very simple survey – one question,” La Boria said. “Have you ever missed school, work, or been unable to leave because you’ve had lack of access to a period product? 100 percent of the women that took the bags said yes.”
They’re focusing on the clear needs in Wards A and F.
“We’ve not focused on Journal Square and Downtown, but I will say that Downtown has sort of been looked at where the other half live, in a way, but there’s a lot of artists that live in Downtown as well,” La Boria said. “(People like) actresses, actors make about $30,000 annually if they’re lucky. There’s a sense of artistic community and women having that struggle.”
For Vazquez, her focus is formed by having been born and raised in Jersey City, “on Audubon before Downtown Jersey City (was gentrified).
“We want to be there, in Jersey City, for any female who is in need, but I would say Ward A and Ward F – we specifically want to focus on those wards, because those are the underdeveloped wards ... if you want to compare it to Downtown, those areas haven’t been developed enough. Based on the research that Aiko does, and specifically the schools in those areas, their budgets are very tight and they can only afford what they can in terms of feminine napkins, so I would say we want to pay attention to those schools very closely.
“Our mission is also to assist with the schools and providing feminine napkins and donations to them that allow them to have anything in stock,” Vazquez said. “(So it’s) underdeveloped in terms of that kind of support.”
In order for people to address this inequity, Vazquez thinks there needs to be more awareness about the level of poverty that can exist in the United States and how it’s part of a global issue.
“Downtown is so filled with New Yorkers … but they’re ignoring those parts of Jersey City that have always had a problem, they’ve always been under-developed,” Vazquez said. “That’s why I’m part of this project – that’s my personal opinion.”
La Boria noted that, worse than being at the poverty level, Wards A and Ward F have the highest numbers of people who not only live in poverty but also below the poverty line. So you have a group of people that are struggling every day to just make ends meet, where $10 is just about all they have till the end of the month.
What has decades of this amounted to? La Boria recounted a story about a friend of hers who is a doctor. He’s Black. A little boy he was treating, also Black, asked him where the doctor was when he came into the examination room.
“And my friend says to him, doctors can be Black,” La Boria said. “And the boy says to him, I’ve never seen any Black doctors.
“And so you have this world within a world that poverty creates and that’s all that they know and that’s why the impoverishment of these communities is so ingrained in these areas.”
In a diner one day, La Boria listened to an older resident reminiscence about a time when there was accountability from neighbors if someone did so much as smoke a joint.
This resident noted that things took the most drastic change for the worse after the crack/cocaine epidemic of the eighties.
“The poverty just remains the same,” La Boria said. “And while this is all going on, you have women, you have girls... that are bleeding having accidents in schools because they don’t have pads, because they’re too embarrassed to ask. And that’s just a part of poverty that people don’t talk about. They focus on food, a lack of shelter … while all this is going on, women are still bleeding.
“If you’re walking down the street and you see someone with a bloody nose, chances are you’re going to help them,” La Boria continued. “Chances are, you’re going to be like, ‘Oh my God, you’re bleeding.’ People don’t just let people bleed. In movies, bleeding is associated with valor … you had a fight, you’re bleeding it’s heroic in a way. And yet so many of us, women, are bleeding every day and ignored and not acknowledged and I think that’s why (Vasquez) and I just said we have to try to bring awareness this somehow.”
During the pandemic, they’ve donated about 3,000 products, La Boria said. “We went to to shelters, food banks and everybody aid the same thing” ‘Nobody every thinks of this. They’re going to be so happy.’”
It’s really pretty simple for Vasquez. Feminine napkins should be available everywhere, like toilet paper.
“Women biologically are so different,” she said. Women can bleed at any point and time. Sometimes it’s not in a timely cycle, because some women. You can be really stressed out at work about something that’s happening and next thing you know you’re bleeding because your body is giving you that signal, so my point is those napkins should be also available in any public place.
“There should just be availability.”
But since there isn’t yet, learn more about The Flow Initiative at https://theflowinitiativefoundation.org/ and consider supporting them and their cause – and especially taking part in the #TheFlowChallenge.
Rules of the #TheFlowChallenge:
Paint a pad
Tag: @theflowinitiative on Instagram and/or Facebook
Use the Hashtag #theflowchallenge
Challenge friends to do the same
Donate in-kind donations to The Flow Initiative at: https://www.gifthero.com/gift-hero-194874344
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