We know where period poverty needs to be fought. We’re already on the front lines, listening, connecting, and caring.
We just need your help fighting it.
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When Yanique Brandford was a child, her mother was determined to keep her daughters in school. She improvised hand-made menstrual products from flexible cardboard covered in plastic and wrapped in crumpled newspaper. These makeshift pads were a practical response to period poverty within her household.
“Growing up in Jamaica, access to essential items like sanitary pads was a luxury for most families in my neighbourhood. Most of what we had went toward food or getting to school. Many of the girls didn’t bother going to school on their period”
When Yanique immigrated to Canada at age 14 and settled in Brampton, she realized that menstrual inequity was not confined to the Caribbean—it was global. As a high school student, she witnessed the challenges faced by immigrants and low-income families firsthand. Motivated by these lived experiences, she began self-funding donation drives on her credit card before formally founding Help A Girl Out in 2018. She was in her first year of university studying physics.
Since 2018, we have distributed nearly two million hygiene and menstrual products to individuals and community organizations serving refugees, BIPOC communities, and low-income families across more than 350 Canadian cities. Yanique is also passionate about supporting projects in the Caribbean and Africa with sustainable in-kind donations. In recognition of her advocacy and national impact, Yanique received the 2020 Global Citizen Prize: Canada’s Hero Award, along with several additional local and national honours.
In recognition of her advocacy and national impact, Yanique received the 2020 Global Citizen Prize: Canada’s Hero Award, along with several additional local and national honours.
Alongside her humanitarian leadership, Yanique has built a career in STEM. Her MSc research focused on improving medical imaging in proton therapy for cancer treatment. She also has experience within the nuclear energy sector. With an academic background in Medical Physics/Biomedical Physics from Toronto Metropolitan University, she applies critical thinking and data-driven strategy to both fields reflecting her commitment to advancing both scientific innovation and community well-being.
“Growing up in Jamaica—access to essential materials like sanitary pads was a luxury. Most of what we had we needed to spend making sure we could eat or get to school. By the end of the month, we couldn’t afford sanitary pads. We would use paper, cardboard—and a range of other things to meet our needs. When I got to Canada I realized that this wasn’t tied to geography. It was global—and in Toronto, the need was really there. So I started Help A Girl Out in 2018. Since then we’ve delivered thousands of hygiene materials to women and girls in across Canada, and around the world.”
She is inspired by her mother, who handcrafted pads for her to wear to school so that she could have equal education and escape the poverty that she was exposed to in her home. & uses her experiences and that of her siblings and peers as a driving force behind her passion for Help A Girl Out (HAGO) and eliminating period poverty. Since 2020, HAGO has distributed hundreds of thousands of hygiene and menstrual product kits for the homeless, refugee, BIPOC and low-income communities in the Toronto GTA and beyond as the COVID-19 crisis had severely impacted Canadians, forcing many families below the poverty line and worsening the circumstances of those who were already there.
She was awarded Global Citizen’s Canada’s Hero Award for her advocacy work through Help A Girl Out, the Viola Desmond award bursary by TMU, the Brampton Board of Trade: Community Impact Award & most recently the Toronto Youth Cabinet: Youth Advocay award.
In addition to her humanitarian efforts, Yanique holds a BSc in Medical Physics and is completing her masters in Biomedical Physics at Ryerson/TMU University. Her area of research aims to improve medical imaging in proton therapy cancer therapy.
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to
