There’s nothing good that comes to mind when you think of periods. Even more so, in India. Here, girls drop out of school at the onset of periods. Women on their period are considered impure and disallowed entry into temples or even their own kitchens. It’s all of this that continues to drag the topic of periods deeper into the dark corners of society.

Stayfree, a leading sanitary brand, is committed to changing the perceptions and behaviour around periods. And we believe the only way to make society more comfortable about this topic is to keep sparking different conversations around this taboo subject.

And that’s what drew our attention to these women in the sex trade. While periods, for them, came with the same set of biological inconveniences, they actually looked forward to it. Because it was the only time of the month where they couldn’t be forced to work.

The curriculum is made up of 8 skills that run these around the month, every month.

To help scale up our ability to train, on International Women’s Day, we put out a social media campaign to recruit volunteer trainers. We also got popular influencers like Olympic medalist, P.V. Sindhu and Instagram celebrity Priya Malik to talk about the initiative.

To introduce the world to our students and to introduce our students to a new source of income, we run exhibitions of our products at various locations and also through our partnership with India's largest retail chain, Big Bazaar.

With the support of Ujjivan, India's largest micro-finance company, we also run financial literacy classes for our students.

With colleges offering to manage the project, banks offering to run financial management classes, and more brands extending their support, Project Free Period is now India's largest volunteering program built through a public-private partnership.