"I started The Dot Org's blog in February 2020 after being inspired by our founders Gabby, Mal, & Nina and the mission their organization brought to Washtenaw County. This platform allowed me to explore menstruation through several lenses, deepening my understanding of the topic. I had not formally heard about period poverty prior to joining TDO, but this social justice and public health issue has since become a project that I am passionate about. TDO has afforded me the opportunity to know many amazing people, become a part of the change I wanted to see in my community, and learn about a prevalent disparity that affects millions of people every day. I am forever grateful to be a leader in this organization" -Kate (Director of Digital Content, blog writer)

"I joined The Dot Org as a freshman in 2018. Back then, the organization was one year old and still learning how to achieve their progressive ambitions. Almost immediately, I was chosen to join the outreach committee and get to work on my own independent project. New to both U-M and Ann Arbor, I threw myself into the city's activist space and dedicated my free time to changing how our community views periods and legislates period products. Four years later, The Dot Org is my most proudest accomplishment of my entire college career. 

Despite countless unanswered phone calls and emails, battles with bureaucracy at the Provost office, and frustrating conversations with those disturbed by openly discussing periods, our team has achieved more than we ever could've imagined. We've provided over 600 period kits to local organizations in need and distributed almost 500 menstrual cups to U-M students. We've collaborated with Skyline High School's period club to donate products for their pilot program. Our latest project was with Ypsilanti Public Library, where we initiated a 6-month partnership to offer free period products in their bathrooms, as well as informative material on how to choose the right period product for your individual cycle. Finally, we worked tirelessly on the campaign to require free period products in all U-M bathrooms (women's and men's). And we were successful. 

These past four years have shown me that hard work for your passion doesn't feel like work, but rather a mission you're dedicated to fulfill. I'm incredibly grateful to have learned this feeling at such a young age, especially for something that is helping people reclaim their body's right to dignity, autonomy, and hygiene. I can't even put into words how lucky I am to have walked in the Angell Hall classroom that October evening in 2018. The Dot Org feels like a piece of me that will never be separated, even when I move thousands of miles away from its home. 

Thank you to the entire team for making this organization so successful and so special. Thank you to Maddie Cutler for allowing me to peacefully transition out of my passion project, knowing it'll be in great hands. And finally, thank you to every single person who has donated, supported, or simply observed The Dot Org and its endeavors. We couldn't have done it without you. With love," -Livvy Hintz (President)

"I was a student at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor when one of my older sister’s best friends, Nina Serr, co-founded The Dot Org. Watching Nina and her co-founders have the opportunity to speak at the TEDxUofM conference, form meaningful connections with the community of people experiencing homelessness, and begin to break down the stigma around menstruation was beyond inspiring. When I got to UofM, I knew right off the bat that The Dot Org had the sort of mission and atmosphere that I was searching for to fortify my college experience. With such a tight knit community, it was easy to feel like I and my ideas were welcomed and accepted by the members of TDO, even before joining the executive board. Many meetings, while also including slides that gave insight into the issue and prevalence of period poverty, consisted of having open conversations about our experiences with menstruation, the stigma surrounding it, and how we could change the narrative. What I have loved (and bragged about) the most about TDO is that nearly every idea raised in meetings is brought to life, and we have been able to see the effects in real time. Between Ann Arbor Public Libraries offering free products, the homeless shelters we partner with being overwhelmed with product donations, the Ann Arbor city ordinance, and the University supplying free products in many bathrooms on campus, we have seen our hard work pay off. Although not all of these changes were a direct result of our work, it feels incredibly gratifying to have contributed to making a difference in the lives of students and community members. I am forever grateful for this group of dedicated students and our founders for creating an opportunity to find my place and to make a positive impact on the UofM and Ann Arbor communities that I adore so much." -Cammie (Director of Outreach)

"In the middle of the pandemic, like so many, I was floundering. However I was lucky enough to find The Dot Org through the President, Livvy Hintz. Immediately I recognized The Dot Org as a community with values and interests I held myself, which made work for the club and my college experience exponentially better. I’m so thankful to have been a member of such a great organization that not only talks about ways to make a difference in the world, but actually executes these plans. I am so proud to say I have contributed to this organization in any way and The Dot Org will always hold a special place in my college experience and life." -Abby (Outreach team) 

This past year has had many unexpected changes, twists, turns, and variants (thank you COVID), but nonetheless many of us can still reflect on the positive aspects of this year. While attending our last Executive Board meeting, our current President reflected on how much growth The Dot has gone through in the past year. As an organization that relied on in-person interaction and fundraising, our leaders and members got creative to ensure that we still fulfilled all pillars of our mission. This blog post may not be as informative or educational as others, but a brief history about TDO’s success in 2021 is warranted after all of the hard work our team has put in. ​

In January, The Dot expanded our Eboard to include more members on all three divisions of our leadership team: advocacy, outreach, and digital. Working with so many individuals allowed us to develop new professional relationships and create so many of the amazing initiatives we accomplished this year. In February, we were virtually hosted by the UM Public Health Association to discuss the impact of period poverty on the public health of our local community. Later that month our Advocacy Team led us through a successful Valentine’s Day gram fundraiser, which reached recipients all across campus. During March and April, TDO was featured in a local newspaper called Groundcover News to highlight and advertise our free period product subscription service. After the summer break, our returning members got to work right away to put together period packages for BirthBrite in Jackson, MI. With Halloween spirit throughout October, we made and hung tampon ghosts around various bathrooms and building on campus to promote TDO’s mission while also providing a free menstrual product for anyone who needed them. We also hosted a Halloween-themed 5K on a rainy day at the end of that month. November was a busy month for us with a tailgate treat bag fundraiser, making period packages for Michigan Movement, and our Kendra Scott collaboration. Our President Livvy Hintz was also featured in Detroit Free Press to discuss the importance of Ann Arbor’s period product mandate. Finally, in December we launched our first ever merch line, hosted a period party where we sold self-care kits, and most importantly, took a public stance on UM lack of decision or action on Ann Arbor City Council’s decision that period products be available in all public restrooms. 

*For this last point, if you are interested in showing the University that there is a need and duty to uphold this ordinance on campus, please click this link to read about the history of UM’s resistance to providing period products in restrooms and sign our petition (https://www.change.org/p/university-of-michigan-administration-university-of-michigan-abide-by-ann-arbor-s-ordinance-to-require-free-menstrual-products).   

As you can see, we have had a very successful year at TDO and we could not have done it without so much support from our community. We look forward to continuing our work and mission in the new year! 

     Major progress has been made in Lansing, MI over the past week as a bill combatting the 6% sales tax on menstrual hygiene products, introduced by Rep. Yancey-(D) and sponsored by Rep. Posthumus-(R), made it through the House of Representatives. Similar bills have been introduced in Michigan before, but this is the first time that this type of legislation has made it far enough to be voted on. With bipartisan support, many are optimistic about the future of this bill and what it means for people who purchase these products on a regular basis. I can tell you firsthand that TDO is very excited!
   Over the past ten years, several states have passed legislation to eliminate the sales tax on all period-related products included pads, tampons, menstrual cups, liners, and other alternatives. Many of these strides have been made possible by state legislators and advocates, who are the best route to help combat period poverty on larger scales. Several of these movements have been championed by the national organization Period Equity (www.periodequity.org), who have had their own experience with the tampon tax and Michigan courts. Their updated statistics show that the “tampon tax” has only been tackled in about half of the states, meaning there is still a long way to go. 
    While 6% may not seem like a significant amount, the culmination of all product purchases adds up quickly. To better visualize this scenario, let’s put it into concrete terms. First, it is important to note that tampons are recommended to be changed about every four hours. There are twenty-four hours in a day, about 8 of which are for sleep, which leaves sixteen hours in a person’s day. Therefore, a sixteen-hour day with a new tampon every four hours, plus at least two for overnight, estimates that the average person with an average flow uses six tampons in a day. Now, multiply this estimate by five, as the average duration of a period is five days. That is 30 tampons for one period! According to Target’s website, the average box of tampons contains between 28-48 tampons. All of this math comes down to a roughly box a month, in which case, shows that the 6% sales tax on every tampon box purchased does has a large cumulative impact on the consumer. Eliminating this tax would relieve a huge financial burden and could reduce the long-standing effects that period poverty has.
    I have written about the tampon tax before and period poverty is a major focus of The Dot. While we do not focus on the legislative aspects of these issues, they are still important to us and significantly play a role in our work. We are hopeful and excited to see where this bill goes and what it means for period-product consumers in the state of Michigan!

1https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2021/10/tampon-tax-could-end-after-michigan-house-passes-bills-to-end-sales-taxes-on-feminine-hygiene-products.html
2https://apnews.com/article/business-health-michigan-gretchen-whitmer-sales-taxes-525ca92a4e08faf1dbe223fd35168cc1
​3https://www.michiganradio.org/health/2021-03-10/a-legal-fight-to-end-the-so-called-tampon-tax
4https://www.pandiahealth.com/the-true-cost-of-your-period/
​

  The DOT Org, and anyone who reads this blog, understands that the inequities in access to menstrual products is an intersectional issue that needs to be addressed for the betterment of menstruators, and non-menstruators alike. Governments from countries such as Scotland, and New Zealand recently announced their plans to offer free menstrual products to people. These announcements drew global attention to period poverty, but there are ways beyond governments that people can care for one another when addressing menstrual equity. Since my freshman year at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I have been curious as to if the university could provide these products to the student community, and what ripple effects prioritizing this could have.
    Receiving a formal education was not something always offered to cisgender women, who currently represent the majority of people that menstruate, so it’s not surprising that schools and other large organizations aren’t set up for their well-being. I grew up attending public schools, where soap and toilet paper weren’t consistent in bathrooms, and if my family did not openly discuss menstruation and could not afford products, I have no idea where I would have turned to get them. When I found out that my school system would start offering them for free following my graduation, I was thrilled. Even though accessing pads and tampons was never an issue for me, knowing that they were available at school made a lot of sense to me. For a lot of people, school is where they spend the majority of their time from age 5-18+, so having the option to get free products there every month makes a lot of sense, especially because not having access can impede on learning.[1] When I started attending college and making financial choices on my own, it became harder to justify spending so much money on pads and tampons monthly, and I opted to invest in a menstrual cup. In the state of Michigan, the tampon tax was recently repealed, which eliminates taxes on menstrual hygiene products, another step in the right direction towards making menstrual products more accessible and affordable.[2] But what about what universities in Michigan, like U-M could do to alleviate period poverty?
    If we’re comparing U-M to Big-10, or Ivy league schools in terms of providing free menstrual products, the University of Michigan is lagging behind.[3] Ohio State[4] and Michigan State[5], U-M’s biggest rivals, already piloted programs to provide free menstrual products. A common thread in what started/pushed these programs at other universities: student power. It’s not impossible for a university to reprioritize its funding, but it often takes a lot of pushing from students. How is this university for the “leaders and best” if we are failing to care for the health of people who menstruate?
    There is already a lot of great student work happening at U-M to address menstrual inequity. Here at the Dot Org, beyond providing tangible products to the community, we conduct research and provide educational resources to not only reduce the stigma around menstruation, but also improve the amount of information available to people. Besides us at Dot Org, there is a pilot program headed by the university to provide free pads and tampons, Maize and Blue cupboard hands some out, and there is a coalition within CSG working with administration to make the pilot program a stronger, lasting reality. Groups like LEO, GEO, and OneU provide a framework for what strong organizing for collective liberation looks like, which is inspiring to see as an undergraduate, and makes me wonder what would happen if existing activist groups brought menstrual health into their activism.
    At U-M and any other organization seeking to address menstrual equity, it is important to address period poverty as it relates to other social issues beyond sexism, such as racism, transphobia, ableism, and ecological destruction. Social justice around identity cannot be addressed in isolation. The university supplying products is a start but is meaningless without input from their target population. Buying healthy, sustainably, and ethically produced products is necessary, and prioritizing buying from black-owned and queer-owned is even more necessary when considering the interlocking systems of oppression that lead to period inequity.[6] I recognize I sound really cynical, which I am a little bit, but mostly I just want the best and want to draw attention to what I see as a really important part of menstrual health. Lately, amidst the pandemic, the mutual aid groups that have grown in prominence in my home and in Ann Arbor have inspired me to look at menstrual inequity through a new lens.[7] Maybe addressing the issue on campus isn’t up to the administration, rather it is in the hands of students to lift up each other,[8] not through a hierarchical lens of charity, but through a shared lens of identifying the needs of one another and providing for each other. I’m optimistic that within my lifetime, the stigma around this topic will be reduced, and the health of entire communities can be improved.


[1] https://www.k12dive.com/news/report-finds-period-poverty-a-top-reason-girls-miss-school/565424/
[2] https://housedems.com/legislation-removes-tampon-tax-in-michigan/
[3] University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Northwestern University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University, University of Wisconsin-Madison
[4]https://www.thelantern.com/2019/08/free-menstrual-product-pilot-beginning-in-dorms/
[5]https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2018/msu-offers-emergency-menstrual-hygiene-products
[6]https://medium.com/@ilerijaiyeoba12/a-call-for-accountability-anti-blackness-in-the-menstrual-justice-space-a1d4649d884f
and https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/soin.12355
[7]https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3mkjv/what-is-mutual-aid-and-how-can-it-help-with-coronavirus
[8]https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-29/-Say-goodbye-to-menstrual-shame-A-movement-across-Chinese-colleges-UYDOBafoti/index.html

    In March 2020, I wrote a brief blog post about how health inequities exacerbated by COVID-19 were also prevalent in the menstruating community. At that time, very little information was known about the virus and its biological implications so I used a sociological perspective to tackle this relationship. Now, almost a year later, I would again like to explore the ways in which COVID-19 has impacted menstruation, but with a biological lens. Although hygiene practices have since been established and first-generation vaccines are being distributed, there still remains a lot of uncertainty about the long-term and various effects of the virus. As the virus spread over the course of last year, patients openly shared their experiences and associated medical issues that arose with their infection. Hundreds of publications, both scientific and not, have explored the symptoms people associated with their COVID-19 experience. Dr. Maria Cohut wrote one such article on the MedicalNewsToday website discussing one of the lesser known bodily changes associated with COVID-19 infection: uncharacteristic menstrual cycle fluctuations. 
    Before diving into Dr. Cohut’s article, let’s begin with some general information about the average menstrual cycle* for anyone who may be unfamiliar with the whole process. A single menstrual cycle lasts 24-38 days during which a reproductive-aged person’s body prepares for a possible pregnancy. The first 1-7 days are marked by bleeding, which is when the uterine lining sheds after the body experiences a drop in hormones after the corpus luteum, which would otherwise support a developing fetus, is expelled from the body. The remainder of the cycle consists of the follicular, ovulation, and luteal phases, all of which are categorized by different hormone fluctuations and bodily changes to prepare for zygote implantation. Now, let’s focus on the beginning portion of the menstrual cycle, famously known as a period. In addition to a week of light to heavy bleeding, menstruators often exhibit a slew of premenstrual symptoms (PMS) including bloating, fatigue, increased appetite, cramps, mood changes, backaches, and headaches. Even for a standard, healthy individual, the menstrual cycle is subject to some irregularity depending on hormonal changes, stress, or other external factors. This is where COVID-19 comes into play. Again, the full extent of the virus’s biomedical influence is not known yet but Dr. Cohut looked at cases in which patients with long COVID-19** experienced previously uncited irregularities with their menstrual cycles. The interviews and Dr. Cohut’s analysis do not suggest a direct causation, but an intriguing correlation of the virus’s impacts on the menstruating body.
    Throughout the article, Dr. Cohut lists several women*** who experienced late or missing periods, an unusual amount of heavy blood clots expelled from the body, and exacerbated PMS symptoms. Each of the interviewees described their cases as having been especially abnormal as they all noticed these changes after COVID-19 infection and often in conjunction with their persisting symptoms. One of the patients explains that these changes occurred in spite of her consistent birth control use**** for the past ten years. The combination of these issues can be incredibly frustrating and often interfere with a person’s quality of life. The people had to readjust their schedules to accommodate for new onsets of cramps and headaches while controlling vicious upper respiratory symptoms during their long recoveries. 
    Unfortunately, with COVID-19 and its associated troubles being so young in the scientific world, there are not many direct interventions for patients experiencing these menstrual complications. Dr. Cohut’s article brings up a relevant point about the research being done to understand COVID-19. Although this is the first pandemic the world has seen in a century, the impact of other viruses and illness on the menstrual cycle is not often studied. The menstruating population makes up a large portion of the world, so in retrospect, should these effects not be an important field of research? As I have mentioned in other posts, the menstrual cycle is a reflection of a person’s internal health, and with a disturbance like a viral infection, people should know to expect associated menstrual changes. Just as COVID-19 showed us that socioeconomic and access inequities continue to impact menstruators, the virus also shows how the periods are not exempt from the impact of a viral infection. As a virus modifies the body, it modifies the respective functions and states of normality associated with it. The scientific community should take this gap in knowledge as a lesson to expand the biomedical research about how sickness may lead to menstrual and hormonal changes. In doing so, the menstrual community would not have to search for answers to determine whether the disruptions to their normal cycles are a part of the viral course or a sign of greater issues.  


​Sources:​​

• https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/menstrual-cycle#:~:text=The%20four%20phases%20of%20the,increase%20the%20chance%20of%20pregnancy.
  
• ​https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/long-covid-and-periods-the-unspoken-impact-on-female-well-being 

 

*Menstrual cycles and the idea of an “average menstrual cycle” differ between individuals and their circumstances. Information used in this context directly came from the Better Health Channel website linked above.
** Long COVID-19 is the term given to patients who experience COVID-19 associated symptoms for longer than the common 2-week period of active symptoms.
*** Only women were interviewed in this article. This does not mean people who do not identify as women cannot also menstruate or are not subject to the same complications as described in the article or in this blog post. 
**** Birth control, depending on the type, often regulates the menstrual cycle and can help decrease PMS symptoms and heavy bleeding during periods