In a quest to ease access to feminine products, local Girl Scout Juliette and PHS junior Alexa Lopez uses her gold award: Pway Project Period to tackle the discrepancies in feminine hygiene for Middlesex county. 

Through her local Girl Scout organization division, GSCSNJ, (Girl Scouts of Central and Southern New Jersey), the juliette (individual girl scout) from troop 102669693 has partnered with a number of local organizations and global non-profits, such as Pway Moms 4 Change, and Days for Girls International to make significant progress, as the latter organization recently opened a chapter in Piscataway. 

Alexa sums up her project as “an outlet to provide education and everyday knowledge to women in our community,” and overall “aims to combat the stigma surrounding period poverty and women’s reproductive health”.

Throughout webinars, seminars, group discussions, donation collections, and workshops with younger troops, Lopez has been able to provide an outlet for this topic and share her knowledge– tackling the stigma behind menstruation.

In her final bridge of Girl Scouts as an Ambassador, Lopez hopes to achieve her Gold Award through this project; the award being the highest of the three awards (other two being Bronze Award and Silver Award) available for scouts to work towards, only available at the Ambassador level.  

Her take-action project has summed up a successful amount of donations in products, (Projects require outside funding like charitable donations) including period underwear, bags, pads, tampons, menstrual cups, hygiene wipes, and baby wipes: all to be donated to statewide women’s shelters and facilities. 

At the YMCA Piscataway Street Festival in early June, Pway Project Period hosted a stand to talk more about the project and collect donations. 

Lopez enjoys the fact that she is “able to work with other like minded women that want to make a change in the world … The necessity of bringing light to this topic that for so long has been censored by society, is how in the future we can ensure global access to a basic human right”; and can’t wait to develop her project further! 

For more info on Project Period, follow the instagram: @pwayprojectperiod