Aydan Jane Garland-Miner

- A Passion For Periods, What Activism Looks Like For Aydan Garland-Miner, president and founder of PERIOD at Washington State University. 
Ever since I was in fourth grade, I’ve watched copious amounts of YouTube videos. At the beginning, they were all about makeup tutorials, and self primping, but over time, evolved into cinematic shorts, and videos about political movements. In 2015, I watched an interview of a young woman named Nadya Okamoto. She had founded a non-profit, called PERIOD, in 2014, which aims to celebrate menstruation, and provide menstrual products to those in need. She was interviewed by one of my favorite YouTubers at the time, Katy Belotte about the work she was doing. I proceeded to follow Nadya on Instagram and keep up with her for several years following. When she announced the pre-order of her book, I started counting down the days until its release. The day it arrived at my house, I started reading it with urgency, and had finished within a few days. 
After reading “Period Power: A Manifesto For the Menstrual Movement,” I went on the period website and looked for a way to get involved. At the time, there were a few hundred chapters across the United States at various high schools and universities,(now we have 600 across all 50 states in the United States, and in 30 countries outside of the U.S.)  including the University of Washington and Central Washington University, but not at Washington State University. I started filling out the application to start a PERIOD chapter, but I didn’t know all the answers to the questions, so I procrastinated it for about a week before sending it in. When I did, I had no idea what to expect, or what the implications were, but I knew that I had been looking for a way to help people since I was little, and there was a chance that this could be the way. Within a few weeks, PERIOD at WSU was an established chapter, and a registered student organization at WSU with weekly meetings, and bi-monthly events. 
I distinctly remember laying in my loft, when I was in high school, trying to go to sleep and thinking about helping others, and how to do so. I had spent hours researching service trips in other countries, even asking my mom to help me look too, but they were always very expensive. At the time, I thought serving others meant going to third world countries, and building schools, which it could be, but was not realistic for me. 
I felt called to PERIOD, in part due to my passion for gender equality, human rights, and justice. Now that I’ve built up the chapter at WSU, was the lead organizer of the Washington State National Period Day Rally, and have been working as the lead policy coordinator in Washington State, I feel very connected to the work we are doing, and doubt it will ever cease. I’ve managed to find a purpose, and a path, activism, something I plan to dedicate the rest of my life to.