Camions of Care: The Teen-Led Organization Giving Tampons to Homeless Women

When you get your period, you probably know where you're going to get tampons or pads. For homeless women, basic feminine hygiene products are harder to come by. Camions of Care, a non-profit organization founded by Nadya Okamoto, an 18-year-old from Portland, Oregon is hoping to change that. (If you're curious, a camion is sturdy cart or wagon designed for bulky loads.) So far, Okamoto and her organization have helped deliver 27,243 period care packages to women and girls in need all over the world.

When Okamoto was 15, her family was declared legally homeless. During that time, she was living at a friend's house two hours from her school. During her commute, she tells Allure that she'd encounter underserved women without reliable access to feminine hygiene products. Because shelters can't keep up with the demand for tampons and pads, the women would get industrious, using newspaper, socks, and brown paper grocery bags instead. "What scared me was that it made so much sense. You can find [brown paper grocery bags] anywhere around Portland," Okamoto says. "But it's so unsanitary because women were getting these bags from recycling bins or trash cans." Besides being stressful and ineffective, non-sterile alternatives could lead to dangerous infections and toxic shock syndrome.

Because of the stigma associated with talking about menstrual cycles, the women Okamoto met were also too embarrassed to ask for the products they needed. "People aren't usually very comfortable talking about periods," Okamoto says. "There's a general lack of education around menstrual hygiene. I'm trying to combat the stigma by starting conversations and taking action to make the topic more accessible."

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When she was a sophomore in high school and her living situation stabilized, Okamoto founded Camions of Care, a youth-run nonprofit that celebrates menstrual hygiene through advocacy, youth leadership, and service. Now, two years later, Okamoto works with roughly 40 high school and college campus chapters to collect donated feminine hygiene products, assemble care packages, and raise funds. Each care package distributed contains what Okamoto calls their "magic formula," or everything a woman needs for a the duration of a menstrual cycle: nine tampons, four maxi pads, and five pantyliners. At the beginning, Okamoto distributed care packages to local shelters in Seattle herself; now, with the network of campus chapters, the organization's reach extends to local shelters in 17 states. Cash donations allow Camions of Care to send the packages to shelters and nonprofit partners in foreign countries like Kenya and India.

To learn more about how you can donate or get involved, visit camionsofcare.org.

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