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When Westminster Christian School senior Carolina Borges saw that the school bathrooms didn’t have free period products for girls in need, she set out to collect and place the products in the bathrooms.
She founded a chapter of Period. A Menstrual Movement at school. The club collects products such as pads, tampons, panty liners – anything to help with a period. Once collected, they have period packing parties.
“We get people together, and we put them in paper bags and give them to people who need them,” she says. “We donate feminine products to people in need. I try to do them as often as I can.”
She wants to do several more drives before the end of the school year.
“When I have a lot of donations, we make sure the cabinets are stocked for a couple of weeks.”
The excess donations are given to those in need outside the school.
Now, Borges is the Period Community Organizer for Florida. She started that position in the fall.
“For me, I want to ensure that everyone is eliminating period poverty and destigmatizing periods,” she says.
She was chosen for the position to promote periods on a legal level. She works with senators and representatives in Florida to change laws to help women and girls.
“I would say, in the State of Florida, we eliminated the period tax,” she says. “Right now, our main goal is to work to promote putting free period products in government buildings.
Like public schools and other types of building like that so everyone has access to it.”
She knows talking about periods is uncomfortable, but the conversations are important.
“It was taboo,” she says. “I dealt with a lot of struggles with my own period.”
She wants girls and women to have a support system.
“I wanted to make sure I was able to provide for myself and others in the community,” she says. “So someone like me, who would be struggling, could get some comfort.”
As a community organizer she’s been approved to talk to her middle school, to the younger girls about periods. The girls might not know about the subject or are super embarrassed about the topic.
She finds it heartwarming that some of the most active donors of period products are men.
At Westminster, she’s a part of the Student Leadership Executive Board and the chair of the Spirit Committee.
She’s a member of the National Honor Society, co-president of the English National Honor Society, the Foreign Language National Honor Society, Mu Alpha Theta, the Art National Honor Society and the Science National Honor Society.
She founded Love for Lotus, an organization to help the Lotus House Women’s Shelter with supplies during the pandemic. Club members collected household supplies for Lotus House every three months.
Borges has completed two internships at two law firms, one at Holland and Knight and the other at Stone, Glass, and Connolly.
At school she tutors students in math and English. She’s worked with five or six elementary through high school students.
Because of COVID she saw elementary school students struggling in math.
“I’ve helped a lot with that and worked a lot with Algebra, Pre-Algebra, and in middle school, Algebra 1, and Algebra 2,” she says. “I love English. It was fun to re-teach as much as I can.”
Borges is awaiting acceptances from several top universities, most along the U.S. east coast. She will major in finance, economics, or statistics, depending on the school.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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