‘This is a monumental honour for me’ - J’can student wins award for work to end menstrual stigma in Canada

Twenty-three-year-old Jamaican student, Yanique Brandford, has been named among seven individuals to receive the Country Hero Award from international advocacy organization - Global Citizen, for their work as social activists in their home countries and elsewhere across the world.

Brandford is the founder of Help A Girl Out (HAGO), a non-profit organisation that focuses on reducing period poverty and eliminating stigma associated with menstruation, and is the first-ever recipient of Canada’s Hero Award.

“Being awarded with this year’s Canada’s Hero Award is a monumental honour for me personally, as well as for HAGO and the menstrual equity movement here in Canada,” Brandford said. “This award not only will open doors for conversations around the issue of period poverty, but will also allow HAGO to further impact the lives of young women who are victims of menstrual stigma,” she noted in a release from Global Citizen.

She migrated to Canada with her mother and sister in 2011, having lived in Rose Town, Kingston and Portmore, St Catherine. By 2016, she had started HAGO by registering it as a non-profit in 2018.

After attending St Augustine and Notre Dame Catholic secondary schools in Brampton, Ontario, she enrolled at Ryerson University. But while her challenges on campus were real, so too were her drive and entrepreneurial spirit.

In an earlier Gleaner interview she outlined how she did acrylic painting and also used oils to design board games and oil paintings, which she sold for funds to put herself through school. She also did fuse glass jewellery in a kiln she operated by renting space in her sister’s garage. Brandford said she started her first business at 16 when she received a government summer company grant and did so successfully.

“It was the skills that I learned during that time which I applied to Help A Girl Out because it taught me how to network. I was a part of the Brampton Entrepreneur Centre, the Small Business Centre, so I had a lot of influential people around me.”

Volunteer Work

She also volunteered in the radiation clinic at Sunnybrook’s Odette Cancer Centre in Toronto, where she assists doctors, nurses and radiation therapists with patient service.

Brandford says her work has deeply personal roots.

“I’m inspired by my mom, who … created menstrual supplies every month when there was no money in the house,” she said. “That has been my motivation.”

HAGO sources supplies and distributes care packages with hygiene and sanitary products to girls and women in Canada and in developing countries, including Jamaica.

The Country Hero Award is a new award category for Global Citizen Prize 2020 that honours individuals around the world who have shown exceptional commitment to the Global Goals in their country and globally, championing the most vulnerable people. The winners, selected in Australia, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, and the UK, will receive a prize of $10,000 to help support their projects to advance progress toward the Global Goals, the release noted.

Prize Money

Brandford says the prize money will be used to further the organisation’s work to provide support to girls and women at risk of period poverty in Canada, ideally reaching more remote Indigenous communities in Northern Ontario with menstrual care packages.

She adds that the funding will also allow the team and her to sew more reusable pads – a new HAGO project, and will help her provide adequate training and software to help HAGO team members lead education and awareness workshops for young girls who have not yet begun menstruating.

“I find hope in the fact that period poverty is an issue that we are able to eliminate completely,” Brandford said.

She is currently studying biomedical physics at Ryerson University, and doing research to develop a new medical imaging modality for proton therapy cancer treatment that would provide real-time tumour visualisation.