Courtesy of Maddy Corson

YaleBleeds is Yale’s only undergraduate organization dedicated to menstrual equity, aiming to educate, empower and promote the advancement of menstruators on campus. Additionally, it works to eradicate period poverty and stigma in the New Haven community. 

YaleBleeds recently held a Love Your Period Paint & Sip event at the Women’s Center, providing a space where attendees indulged in mocktails and discussed their personal perceptions of their own periods.

Co-president Maddy Corson ’26 led the abstractionist painting workshop using colors most associated with period blood, textures and smells. She said the event was held to facilitate engagement between students and for Yalies to focus on their identities as “menstruators.”

“I was able to bring some of my artistic background into leading folks through an exercise about what we associate with our periods and express through art how social and cultural taboos around periods influence us and explore the metaphorical and emotional elements of our period,” Corson said.

Corson coins this art “memento menstruum” painting. The term is derived from the Latin “memento mori” paintings, which translate to “remember you must die.” “Memento menstruum,” in turn, means “remember the period.”

The event was held after Election Day, something Corson believes was important to have as it provided a space for students to process their feelings about what the incoming administration means for reproductive health.

YaleBleeds will also host a Uterus Cookie Making Workshop on Nov. 15, a Sustainable Menstrual Products Workshop on Nov. 16 and a Tie-Dye Totes event on the same day.

The cookie-making workshop will be led by community coordinator Emi Shigekane ’27 and will be held in the Pauli Murray College kitchen. Attendees will bake and decorate uterus-shaped cookies while getting to know one another as members of YaleBleeds.

“The exciting element of it is that folks get to normalize our reproductive health systems and learn a little bit more about the anatomy,” Corson said.

The Sustainable Menstrual Products Workshop on Nov. 16 is the second installment in a series of three workshops that have been offered over the past several semesters in collaboration with GREEN at Yale, a sustainability group.

In the workshops, participants are taught how to use, insert, clean and maintain menstrual cups, discs and period underwear. The workshops will be taught at La Casa, the Native American Cultural Center and the Asian American Cultural Center. 

“At the workshops, we teach about the benefits of reusable products and explain how to use them,” Elise Wilkins ’25, who coordinates workshops, said. “We also give free menstrual products to all attendees.”

YaleBleeds, in collaboration with Dwight Hall, has been providing free feminine hygiene products to New Haven Public Schools as a part of a stopgap solution for Connecticut’s menstrual equity law. The law was passed in 2022, but the deadline to implement it in public schools kept getting pushed, Karley Yung ’25, co-president of YaleBleeds, said. Yung added that YaleBleeds received “really good feedback from teachers and administration” at the schools. 

Corson and Yung credit “community momentum” and people in the New Haven community offering assistance and partnership with the Yale entity. Corson says, though, that a recent challenge has been largely “bureaucratic” and tied to limited communication with Yale Facilities.

“Last semester, YaleBleeds was responsible for negotiating with [Yale Facilities] to get free period product dispensers installed in academic restrooms on campus,” Corson said. “As you might have noticed, those have not been stocked recently, and that’s a huge challenge for us because we’ve been investing this semester so many resources.”

She says that YaleBleeds has had trouble getting in contact with administrators and making sure regular relationships and communications get established. Corson believes this is likely due to the administration’s busyness and dubbing menstrual equity “not a real administrative priority,” despite YaleBleeds’ insisting that it is “an incredible student priority.”

Many of the dispensers are empty or out of order, according to Corson. She fears the dispensers have become ornaments on the bathroom walls rather than resources for the student body.

Yung said that YaleBleeds board has met with custodial union members at Yale who stated that Yale Facilities neglected to train them in stocking and restocking the dispensers. 

Yale Facilities declined to comment on the matter.

Pivoting from this challenge, YaleBleeds has begun working with UHope Haven, a student organization at the Yale School of Public Health, to distribute period products to different healthcare centers in the community and Neighborhood Health Project to assist in stocking community harm reduction pantries in New Haven.

YaleBleeds advocates not out of principle but out of necessity, Corson said. She hopes YaleBleeds’ efforts prevent people from overlooking the intersectionality of menstrual equity and period health, especially in New Haven’s significant Black and Brown communities.

YaleBleeds hosts weekly meetings on Sundays at 3 p.m. in LC 103.