A champion in fighting period poverty, reducing waste, and teaching the timeless skill of sewing. 

If you’ve ever thought of period products as disposable, single-use necessities, Help A Girl Out (HAGO) might just change the way you see them.

Founded by Yanique Brandford in 2018, HAGO is tackling two global challenges at once: period poverty and plastic waste. With over two billion people of menstruating age worldwide, traditional disposable products add up to a staggering 10.6 billion pounds of waste every year. For many, affordability and access are just as pressing as sustainability. That’s where HAGO steps in—with a mission to accelerate menstrual equity through access, empowerment, and education.

Yanique’s inspiration is deeply personal. Growing up in Jamaica, she and her family often had to make the hard choice between food, school transportation, and menstrual products. When pads weren’t affordable, Yanique improvised with paper, cardboard, and other makeshift solutions. Determined to keep her daughter in school, her mother began sewing reusable pads by hand. That act of care made a lasting impression – showing Yanique that dignity and opportunity could be stitched together one pad at a time.

When she later moved to Canada, Yanique realized the problem wasn’t limited to her home country. Even in Toronto, she found that many people still struggled to afford menstrual products.

Since then, HAGO has distributed hundreds of thousands of menstrual and hygiene kits across the Greater Toronto Area and beyond, reaching homeless, refugee, BIPOC, and low-income communities. The pandemic only made this work more urgent, as families already on the financial margins faced even tougher choices. HAGO’s grassroots distribution helped ensure that menstruators didn’t have to sacrifice dignity during an already difficult time.

But Yanique wanted to go further – addressing not just access, but also sustainability. That vision sparked The Reusables Project, an initiative that brings together volunteers to make reusable pads for the community, while also teaching new people how to sew. Since 2021, the project has led more than 140 free beginner sewing classes, welcomed nearly 800 new sewists, and produced close to 8,000 reusable pads. Most of this activity has been centered in the GTA and Peel Region, but its impact is national.

“While trying to sew our initial goal of 5,000 pads – we realized that not a lot of people know how to sew! And so it was very challenging to find people to help sew these pads. We ended up finding 250 volunteers across the country and sewed 8,000 pads. We surpassed our goal but in the back of my mind I was always quite disappointed that such a beautiful skill,  important, valuable skill, wasn’t very widely practiced. A lot of people – especially young people don’t know how to sew and I thought that was an injustice that needed to be addressed.”

The project is more than sewing, it’s about rekindling a timeless skill, empowering youth, and weaving resilience and community back into Canadian homes. Each pad made, keeps plastic out of landfills and ensures someone has reliable access to period products for years to come.

The effort has earned Yanique widespread recognition, including Global Citizen’s Canada’s Hero Award, the Viola Desmond Award Bursary from TMU, and the Toronto Youth Cabinet’s Youth Advocacy Award. Yet, she continues to balance advocacy with academics, pursuing a Master’s in Biomedical Physics at TMU with research aimed at improving cancer treatment imaging.

HAGO’s model beautifully illustrates how lived experience, when combined with community care, can spark systemic change. What began with a mother’s stitches in Jamaica has grown into a movement of empowerment, education, and sustainability in Canada.