Free menstrual product dispensers have been placed in select bathrooms across campus for students to take as they need them.
According to the Center for Well-Being’s website, 16 different dispensers can be found in the following places on the St. Paul campus:
- Anderson Athletic & Recreation Complex Rooms 129 and 137
- A restroom on the first and second floors of the Center for Well-Being
- O’Shaughnessy Education Center Rooms 126 and 326
- O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library Rooms 214 and 420
- McNeely Hall Rooms 143 and 243
- Murray-Herrick Campus Center Rooms 121 and 127
- All Schoenecker Center restrooms
- Susan S. Morrison Hall Rooms RR01 and RR03
The Minneapolis campus has them in Schulze Hall Room 224 and Terrence Murphy Hall Room 250.
The dispensers were put in last spring after being long-awaited by students like senior Rose Hissom. What first started out as just a small supply stored in select campus bathrooms has now developed into 16 dispensers funded by the Luann Dummer Center for Women that provide students with free period products.
Hissom is passionate about the accessibility of period products after she experienced the hardship of getting access two years ago when she started at St.Thomas.
“I guess I have to learn how to use Metro Transit to go and get pads,” Hissom described thinking at the time.
When she began attending St. Thomas, there were very few places to get menstrual products on campus, and if they were available, Hissom said she believed them to be overpriced.
Beginning on January 1, 2024, all Minnesota public high schools and colleges were required by state law to have menstrual products accessible in their bathrooms.
Following this, private colleges like St. Olaf and Macalester also began supplying products for free, even though they were not legally required to. This begged the question for students like Hissom: “Why can’t we do what they do?”
Her passion for this issue led Hissom to create the Period Product Advisory Committee at St. Thomas. The committee is a group of students who, as Hissom describes it, are focused on the “emergency supply problem” of period products.
“The situation where someone is between classes and running around, and they can’t go back to their living space for the day, and they realize they got their period…‘I need a menstrual product fast!’ They need one product in a quick timespan,” Hissom said.
The committee was created at the beginning of the spring semester last year.
“The goal was to create a more centralized system where students know, ‘If I go in this bathroom, there will be a dispenser and there will be products there and I can get them at any time,’” Hissom said.
Through research and surveys, the committee gathers student feedback on how they would like to see this issue addressed and resolved.
The Luann Dummer Center for Women focuses on the students’ side of things, and then the Center for Well-Being does the management of getting the products and distributing them into bathrooms.
“They are who is putting the dispensers out and funding them,” Hissom said.
One of the key people who has contributed from the Center for Well-Being is April O’Brien. She has spent three and a half years at St. Thomas as the Senior Director of Operations and Health Services.
Similar to Hissom, O’Brien felt the need for St. Thomas to supply products, just as other colleges and high schools do.
“Knowing that 80% of our student population comes from Minnesota schools, they’re going to arrive here and be expecting that when they go into a bathroom, there’s going to be period product available to them,” O’Brien said.
She began her work towards this cause in November 2023 when she sent out her first request for a grant for this project. By the spring of 2024, dispensers began getting placed around campus.
“We’re hoping for the future to get a more institutional annual budget rather than have it be a grant from the Center for Well-Being,” Hissom said.
This project was originally funded by donors to the Center for Women.
However, O’Brien says it is up to the buildings that the products are in to keep them stocked.
“We will order them, install them, do all of that, as long as that school will support the product for a year and will budget for that, we are happy to own the logistics of it,” O’Brien said.
Avery Mikolai can be reached at miko2197@stthomas.edu.
