Project Eve aims to help homeless women obtain necessary feminine hygiene products and will run from March to the end of April.

    “The goal of Project Eve is to help homeless women who do not have access to the pads and tampons they so desperately need. We can help them by simply giving them free products,” project organizer junior Siphosami Dongozi said.

    Because these women are homeless and do not have a sufficient income, getting money to buy both food and hygiene products is expensive due to the tampon tax. There are currently 40 states, including Texas, that enforce a tax on tampons and other products. It is either billed as a regular sales, gross receipt or luxury tax, according to CBS DFW, even though these products are not luxury items.

    Most women who do not have access to feminine hygiene products steal or use alternative items such as cotton balls, clothing and sometimes paper or plastic bags.   This donation benefits homeless women by reducing the chances of getting an infection from using the wrong products.

    “We hope to provide enough products for women in need for an entire year,” junior Veda Tsai said.

    Dongozi and her team members, Tsai and junior Anissa Dittmar, have been organizing this charity drive since early September. The drive began on the first day in March.      Dittmar is in charge of the storage of all donations, and Tsai assists in the design aspects of the project, such as producing the logo and t-shirts.

    Dongozi has Choir, Avid, Debate, National Honor Society (NHS), Key Club, Habitat for Humanity, Lady Wildcats Basketball, NTCUMC, Child Development and Health participating in and promoting the drive. The math, science, English and AP U.S. History teachers that she has talked to have all agreed to keep boxes in their rooms to accept donations. The drive will also work with Clark and Vines.

    Everyone can donate. In every building, except for E building, there will be a box where students can drop off feminine hygiene products. There will be flyers everywhere  showing which teachers will have boxes in their rooms.

    “We have managed to collect a large amount of goods so far,” Tsai said.

    Once all the products are collected, Dongozi and her team will use an outside program that has trucks which Project Eve can use for free to transfer the products to shelters, such as The Wilkinson Center, the Salvation Army, Dallas Life Foundation, Homeward Bound Inc., Brighter Tomorrows,Turtle Creek Manor, The Samaritans Inn and New Beginnings.

    “We also tried reaching out to Genesis Women’s Shelter, but they already had too many products, like 8,000. I was so happy. That was the best rejection ever,” Dongozi said.

Being that this is the first charity drive at PSHS to have students donating feminine hygiene products, the members of Project Eve had to learn how to run this type of drive.        They do not have a clear pathway to follow but are blazing a trail of their own.

    “The largest obstacle is just trying to get organized,” Dittmar said. “We all have so many ideas and want to help these women so badly that sometimes we try to jump ahead, but we have been pretty good about pulling things together.”

    To reach even further than the school organizations, local churches and homeless shelters, Project Eve has a website, Tinyurl.com/MenstrualMarch, that spreads their message of who they are and what they do.

    “With a long road ahead, I see Project Eve expanding even further than the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, and maybe even farther than Texas,” Tsai said. “It might sound idealistic, but I know the foundation and basis of Project Eve is something everyone can understand, and it will spark waves of movement.”

    Even if the project does not reach the entire metropolitan area, they just hope to use the school’s resources and its students in order to give back to the less fortunate.

    “There has been a few hurdles to jump over from the challenges of informing such a large group of the community, to organizing where everything goes and when. It’s been an incredible experience. Despite the hard work, it’s very rewarding and we hope to be able to assist and reach out even more,” Tsai said.

    While Dongozi acknowledges that menstruation is considered an awkward subject in society, she wants to break barriers between boys and girls about periods by making the project a normality. With all their work, the creators of Project Eve hope to make this a new tradition at PSHS to bring the Wildcat community together in the spirit of giving back to people in need.