Amika George

Case Study

How would you like to be described?

I am a 20 year old student from London and I am a feminist activist. I received the Global Goals Campaign Award in 2018 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

How would you describe what you do?

I started the campaign and petition #FreePeriods, asking the government to address period poverty in the UK by providing free menstrual products to all children on free school meals. I decided to use the momentum that was building to work with The Pink Protest to organise a protest in December 2018, where over 2000 young people turned up on a really cold day, wearing red and waving banners with period puns on them. I’m also trying to destigmatise periods. They’re such a taboo subject and they’re completely normal and natural, and I don’t really understand why we can’t talk about them openly.

What is your greatest achievement?

In March 2019 the government announced that £1.5 million of the tampon tax fund would be given to charities to end period poverty in the UK. I don’t think that it is a victory for the campaign, because we need to see a long term pledge from the government to end period poverty, but it is a change and there is change happening all over the world. I am really proud of the fact that the government did listen after the protest, and I think that to me it really solidified the idea that young people can do a lot of things that a lot of adults don’t expect them to. A lot of the criticism behind the campaign was that this is just clicktivism and that people will just sign these petitions and then tweet it or whatever, but people did actually turn up on a really cold day.

What was the cause or ’trigger for this journey of making the world a better place through being useful and kind? And how old were you? When did you realise you could make a difference?

In 2017, aged 17, I was just having breakfast one morning and I read an article about girls in the UK missing school for up to a week every month just because they can’t afford menstrual products. This idea of period poverty was completely alien to me. I’d never heard of it. I talked to my friends and family and they’d never heard of it and I had never been personally affected by it. I did some research and found that this was happening all over the UK and all over the world, and not only that but the government wasn’t doing anything about it. So being a teenager, and growing up in this digital age, I did the only thing I could think of, which was to start a petition on change.org. I called it #FreePeriods.

Was it something your parents are/would have been proud of and encouraged?

Yes, I sent the petition to my mum and then I asked my dad to send it round his work, which he was kind of reluctant to do at first, but then he did.

Who or what were your early influences?

I’m inspired by my grandmother who was a force of nature – feisty, independent in her thinking, full of self-belief and the strongest woman I’ve ever met. Also, I think I kind of grew up surrounded by people who would have called themselves a feminist, but personally I didn’t really think it was that big a deal until I realised how big a deal it was.

What were you doing at 16?

I think one of the things that people would forget about #FreePeriods is that I never planned any of this. I started it when I was 17, in my first year of A Levels. I never really thought that I would start this thing that has become quite big.

What advice would you give your 16 year old self?

Definitely don’t feel that you have to do everything on your own. It is really important to build a community of people with the same goals as you. They will always work together with you and you can always feel encouraged and supported, even when you may receive some negativity.

What advice would you give to other young people?

My advice to other young people trying to campaign against an issue or just talk about an issue that they feel passionately about, it would just be to be really bold. I think we’re told from a young age that young people don’t do much, and they’re not politically engaged or socially aware, and I think that it is really just the time now to prove them wrong. Young people are really powerful. I think we have social media, which is the most incredible tool at our fingertips that we can use to spread an idea across the world.

What has been the most difficult challenge on the way and how did you overcome it?

There was all this support online, there were people retweeting, posting on Instagram and the word #FreePeriods was everywhere, but it didn’t feel like it was moving forward fast enough and it didn’t feel like the government was taking notice in the way I wanted them to. So I thought the best way was to take to the streets and do a protest. We held a protest on the 20th December 2017, and it was right outside Theresa May’s bedroom. I was really nervous in the days before, wondering if it would be just me, my mum and a few friends. In the end over 2000 young people came. It was the most incredible day and the most incredible feeling.

What do you think are the changes we need to see in the world and how can being U&K help solve those things?

We can’t trust our policymakers to take action on issues that seem obvious to us. If we want to see change, it falls on us to create that change. I will continue with the campaign for as long as it takes. I think that now that I’ve started and now that there are so many people who want to see #FreePeriods succeed and an end to period poverty in the UK, I’m not going to stop until that is achieved. I definitely will continue a life of activism, even though that does sound kind of daunting. We all need to be fighting for women to have a bigger part to play in companies, industries and countries. We need to fight for a fairer and more progressive society – don’t take the status quo. Think of your ideal world, and let’s go and get it!

How are you useful and kind to yourself - what helps and hinders?

It is that change and that feeling of solidarity that really drives me forward. It comes back to this idea of sisterhood, this idea that you never feel completely dejected when you know that so many people have your back and want the things that you do.

How are you both useful and kind to others (the easy ones and those who are more difficult to be U&K to)?

It can be hard when you meet people who wouldn’t call themselves feminists or don’t know what it is, and it is up to you to tell them, but they don’t always agree. It is easy to think that we are normal and in the majority. But when you see the work that you’ve done actually impact people in a positive way, it’s so uplifting! I want to do much, much more though.

What is your biggest challenge in the future?

In the world of period poverty I think the biggest problem is silence: not talking about our periods means a quiet subservience, making us complicit in society’s attempt to render us peripheral and useless. At the moment we have this conception that periods are only a women’s issue so only women can talk about them, and that stops men from getting involved, and that stops us from getting over this embarrassment. I dream of a day when all women can free the tampon from the inside of their sleeves and wave them in the air as they march to the toilet, but I also dream of a day when not a single girl on earth will miss out on an education or a childhood just because she was born with a uterus.

What do you wish you had done differently?

It kind of comes back to me not really knowing that I would have to be juggling all these things. I started it when I was 17, in my first year of A Levels. I kind of just learnt how to manage it and I wouldn’t say that I was very good. At first, I was trying to do everything to raise awareness, but I realised that wasn’t really feasible. You realise that you don’t have to say yes to everything and everyone.