Brazen Menstruation

Menstruation is bold. Period.

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Inspiration

    Our inspiration lies in the importance of inclusivity when discussing menstruation. This not only includes nonbinary and transgender individuals, but also those who do not have regular access to safe menstruation materials, such as homeless or incarcerated peoples. Our team is extremely passionate about helping others through this common bond, as well as forming a community that empowers those who menstruate, rather than treating the topic as foul.

What it does

    Our website, Brazen Menstruation, offers a plethora of opportunities for users to help the cause, including signing petitions, purchasing period-friendly clothes, and volunteering to make Brazen Boxes. For those who need materials, there are resources for them to locate Brazen Boxes or Planned Parenthoods.

How we built it

    We built our website using HTML and CSS, and the games were made using Javascript. The first steps of our project were completed by designing a wireframe in Figma, and Procreate was used to make our logo and custom graphics. Our team members were relatively spread out among our specialties (back- vs front-end dev), so we were able to work in teams for most of the time.

Challenges we ran into

    Since our topic is widespread and talked about often in our area, one of our biggest challenges was making our website unique with innovative components. To work through this challenge, we considered niche aspects of the issue, including pulling our focus toward homeless and incarcerated individuals. Additionally, we believe that including two games made from scratch set us apart from previous websites.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

    We are extremely proud of every single step we were able to take together as a team! None of us had ever been to a hackathon before this, so it was exhilarating to have the opportunity to learn as we went. Specifically, we're proud of being able to make a website completely from scratch. Even though we ran into many challenges (centering text, balancing fonts), we were able to use each other's skills to work through it.

What we learned

    We learned that coding one project really does take a whole team. Even if there's a full-stack developer on the team, it's highly unlikely that they would be able to finish it all on their own. We also found that it's important to explore what we are skilled at outside of strictly coding, because it came in handy when making our projects stand out (ex: digital art for making our logo).

What's next for Brazen Menstruation

   As we built our website, we realized that the plans we made were completely tangible, and that we had the potential to make Brazen Menstruation into a real organization! It's exciting to see that an idea we came up with in the spur of the moment came to life through our work. Even if we are not able to continue work on this specific project, we formed a team that will always work together (we've even started making plans for which hackathon we want to attend next! Spoiler alert--it's the one with free boba).
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