FERGUS – Students at Bishop Macdonell Catholic High School collected almost 400 hygiene products to donate to Guelph Wellington Women in Crisis (GWWIC) this spring.
It was a school-wide initiative launched by the Bishop Mac’s Swellness Council, a group of students that supports social justice, equity and wellness.
Chair and Grade 12 student Juliana Slade said the council “works to promote wellness within students and staff and encourage social justice and equity initiatives.”
The council, with about 10 regular members in Grades 9 through 12, organizes a range of events, from food drives to stress relief activities.
Slade said the members are “super eager and awesome and work really hard to make sure we get our stuff done.”
So when council member (and future chair) Survan Patel, in Grade 10, suggested the council work to collect hygiene products, the students ran with it.
“I wanted to help people,” Patel said. “That’s why I joined the council – we do things to help people in our community.”
Patel said the idea came when she was scrolling Instagram and saw a video about period poverty (a lack of access to menstrual products) and she thought, “I want to make a difference surrounding that in our community.”
Slade contacted GWWIC to ask if they wanted the council to launch a period product drive at Bishop Mac.
“They said they had enough feminine hygiene products, and would rather we focus our effort on collecting bathing products,” Slade said.
So the council switched gears slightly, and named the initiative the “Dignity Drive,” because everyone deserves the dignity of having access to these products, she said.
In early April the council distributed bags to each homeroom class in the school, and encouraged the students to fill the bags with donations, Patel said.
They asked their peers to collect soaps, shampoos, bath bombs, face masks and other hygiene products for GWWIC.
“There was a competition where the class with the most products would win a civvies day,” Patel said, which means the students don’t have to wear their uniforms to school.
The winning class was a small Grade 11/12 biology class, where less than 20 students collected about 80 items – “so they really worked hard to get all the products,” Patel said.
Slade and Patel also created a bulletin board about GWWIC to teach their peers about issues the organization supports women with on a regular basis.
And Slade went into each homeroom class to explain the issues and encourage students to donate items.
During the drive, Ontario took a significant step towards declaring intimate partner violence an epidemic, something Slade said came up in conversations among Bishop Mac students and helped to enforce the importance of the drive.
Bishop Mac teacher Joanna Hotsonyame said the effort students put into planning the drive, meeting a need in the community, helping women and educating their peers “is really inspiring and awesome.”
Hotsonyame is one of the teachers that supports the council, but said “the councils at Bishop Mac are very much student-led, so the teachers are just there to help with logistics and getting things organized.
It’s the students that do most of the work.
“I’m glad to be able to work with this council where kids can bring forward their ideas and initiatives, make them happen in our school and have a positive impact in our community,” Hotsonyame said.
