By Rajvee Patel
The Virago Initiative is a nonprofit project dedicated to providing local shelters and organizations with essential feminine hygiene products and educating people about menstruation. Senior Akanksha Dendukuri, president and founder of the organization, initiated this project as a way to empower women.
Since its establishment at the end of April, The Virago Initiative has donated 5,000 to 6,000 products, including pads, tampons, and shaving cream to locations such as the Asian Women’s Home (AWH) in San Jose. Dendukuri is currently working with a team of three: Senior Ansha Shekhar, Senior Suhani Gupta, and herself.
“‘Virago’ is actually Latin for ‘strong, female warrior’ and I thought it was very fitting for our message because we are trying to empower women,” Dendukuri said. “All three of us have always been very actively feminist … and so we decided that with our free time, we wanted to do something that would help our community and combine our interest in feminism.”
Dendukuri and her team have raised $1,040 in funds and donated $333 to Bags of Hope Stockton, an organization that creates free menstrual care packages for women and girls every month.
“We use the money to buy menstrual products like pads and tampons,” Dendukuri said. “We also created care packages for the homeless in partnership with a different nonprofit project called Coronacovery, and so we used some of our funds to buy the things that went inside the packages.”
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, some of their donations have not been able to go through, but The Virago Initiative is still trying to organize a way to coordinate those donations. In the future, Dendukuri plans on hosting a guest speaker event to focus more on the educational side of her initiative.
“We’ve been actively creating social media posts and trying to educate others on menstrual equity and menstrual education, so we can raise awareness,” she said. “It is a little hard to get things going … so we’re trying to adjust to that to see how we can maintain attendance and still get the point across.”