Changing the world, one girl at a time.

Girl Up is a world-wide organization dedicated to combating the problems faced by women across the globe.

“Girl Up is a organization of WS students who try to fight issues in today’s society such as gender inequality and gender discrimination,” said club advisor Tisa Frederick.

From February 22nd to March 15th, Girl Up held a drive where it collected women’s necessities such as pads, bras, and tampons in order to spread awareness of the importance of women’s hygiene.

While many women take access to such hygiene products such as pads, bras, and tampons for granted, those in poverty–and homeless women especially–are not always so lucky.As a result, many people are suffering the effects of its absence such as infections and toxic shock syndrome (TSS), especially homeless women. In order to fight against this, Girl Up is sending all the donations to a homeless organization named New Hope Housing, which is an award-winning non-profit organization founded in 1977 which It hopes to end the cycle of homelessness by providing the services they need to get back on their feet. By sending these necessities to New Hope Housing, Girl Up hopes to improve daily the lives of homeless women in Northern Virginia

The drive is being held from February 22nd until March 15th. If one wanted to donate to the causes, the Girl Up club placed small boxes in the women’s restroom across the entire school. For small donations,the products could have been placed in small boxes inside of the women’s restrooms in order to ensure the privacy of the donators. However, if one wanted to donate a large amount of bras, tampons, and/or pads, then there was a larger box besides the Career Center specifically for that purpose.

“Not only is homelessness such a issue, but getting access to those products is such a necessity in order to stay healthy, and the fact that they don’t have that is wrong,” said junior Nihal Koyash.