On this episode of Let’s Be Real, 17-year-old host Sammy Jaye sits down with another young entrepreneur, Nadya Okamoto. At only 16 years old, Nadya founded her own nonprofit, Period.org, to fight for justice around women’s menstrual health and hygiene. Now 22, her company is the largest youth-run women’s health NGO; she’s a junior at Harvard, a published author, a recently signed model, and has been recognized on Forbes’ "30 Under 30" list. More importantly, her organization has done phenomenal work around abolishing the luxury tax on period products, distributing tampons and pads to homeless and low-income women, and is working to have menstrual hygiene products provided free of charge in schools, women’s prisons, and public restrooms around the country. Sammy gets the scoop on what got Nadya interested in this work, how she went about starting her nonprofit, and how she juggles it all.
In her freshman year of high school, Nadya’s mother lost her job, forcing the family into a months-long period of homelessness. Nadya’s commute to school went from ten minutes to two hours on public transit, and they lived in an area with multiple homeless shelters, so Nadya started seeing the same homeless women each day. She would stop and talk to them, asking how they managed and what they found the most difficult about their situation, and their menstrual hygiene was one of the first things they mentioned. “They told me stories about using literal trash,” she says, “socks, toilet paper, cardboard...to take care of their periods.” The general stigma attached to periods was a huge motivator for her, as well; she points out to Sammy that while “no one tells you” to hide your period products from people when you go to the bathroom, nearly every woman has, proving that “you’re conditioned by society that this literal piece of cotton is an object of shame.”
She also learned about the luxury tax placed on period products in many states, making tampons and pads more expensive than other health and hygiene items. All of these issues related to periods became the mission for her organization, first working to distribute free products to homeless shelters, then leading fights in the legislature to abolish the period tax and provide free products in prisons, schools, and public restrooms. “If you went into a bathroom and there was no toilet paper, you’d be pretty upset,” she says. And periods are “just as natural, and can come on just as unexpectedly.” How did she manage to build this hugely successful organization at just 16? “I had no strategy,” she says. “I Googled everything.” She hopes more young people follow in her footsteps: “I think a lot of people get stopped just wondering, ‘What’s my first step?’ There is no right first step. You just have to do it.”
Hear more about Nadya and her organization’s incredible victories in menstrual health and hygiene, what her next big goal is, how she balances her Harvard workload with her nonprofit activism, what she does to relax, and much, much more on this inspiring episode of Let’s Be Real.
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