Period Poverty in Philadelphia and What We’re Doing About It

On a hot, July day in 2019, Allison Casola, PhD sat on the train to work. She’d been wracking her brain for a new research project in women’s health. Scrolling through the news on her phone, an article caught her eye. She scrolled back up and re-read the headline:

“After learning some teens use socks for their periods, Mount Airy woman started delivering free pads and tampons”

Through the article, she learned of a mother-daughter duo from Philadelphia, Lynette Medley and Nya McGlone, who started their own non-profit organization called No More Secrets to help women struggling with period poverty.

“Arriving at Jefferson Station,” Dr. Casola heard on the loudspeaker. She tucked her phone away and got off the train but couldn’t stop thinking about the great initiative she’d read about. The article inspired her to begin to shift her next research adventure towards understanding period health and wellness.

Coincidentally, a few months later, at Community Research Day, Dr. Casola saw the same women she read about in the article on the train. “When we met, we instantly clicked,” Dr. Casola stated. Since then, they went on to write and win a grant to fund research in period health, collaborate on research ideas and write several papers.

With the grant, Nya, Lynette and Dr. Casola worked together to formulate a study to interview women that No More Secrets serves in order to fully understand their lived experiences with menstruation and period poverty. Together, they wanted to understand the physiological and social constructs surrounding menstrual health in Philadelphia to gain a deeper insight into how women felt towards periods and why, and how society has either helped (or hurt) women experiencing periods.

During interviews conducted as part of the study, a young woman stated, “My mom actually didn’t teach us a lot about our menstrual cycle.” Dr. Casola found that a lot of women felt uninformed about period health. They turned to community-based resources—such as No More Secrets— and a plethora of Google searches to better understand their cycle. One woman shared, “[Doctors] taught me how to use the app on a phone. The Period Tracker.” The women were eager to learn about their cycles, they just needed the proper resources to do so. They stressed needing to have even more accessible information about menstrual health and wellness available to them.

As Dr. Casola listened to the women’s stories, she realized many women agreed that their menstrual characteristics were burdensome. “I’ve had such severe bleeding, I’ve soiled through my underpants and my clothing after two hours,” one woman said. Each woman dealt with the bleeding differently, from paper towels to underwear specifically designed for periods. No matter what, the materials used to deal with their periods were an essential part of managing their symptoms. The women needed free and low-cost menstrual products to help end period poverty.

Through studies like these and community organizations like No More Secrets, Dr. Casola, Nya and Lynette share a goal of ending period poverty and creating a safe and emotionally healthy environment for women to carry out their natural bodily processes.

“People oftentimes don’t realize that period poverty is much more than affording menstrual products, it also encompasses access to proper bathrooms to wash up and areas for waste disposal,” says Dr. Casola.

With this research, Dr. Casola hopes to shed light on menstrual health awareness and disparities to help change how menstrual health is viewed in the community to help combat period poverty. She continues to volunteer with No More Secrets, who are working tirelessly to create safe spaces for menstruators with access to menstrual products.