(This article was originally shared by B Local British Columbia)
When I was growing up, there were times when my mom and I relied on the food bank for food and period products. It’s a quiet reality shared by more families than people realize, but one that rarely makes its way into conversations about infrastructure, workplaces, or public design.
Years later, when I founded joni with my business partner Jayesh Vekariya, my experiences shaped a simple question about how systems work.
Consider the toilet paper test.
I noticed that whenever I walked into any office bathroom, any school washroom, any airport stall there was a roll of toilet paper. Nobody put it there as a charitable act. Nobody held a board meeting about whether employees deserved it or asked for ROI around it. The organization simply understood that when a person needs to take care of a basic biological function, the tools to do so should be present. Withholding them would be absurd.
It made me wonder why this same logic had never extended to periods — and what would be different if period care was accessible, just like toilet paper.
The Real Meaning of Give to Gain
That question sits at the heart of this year’s International Women’s Day theme: Give to Gain. As a B Corp, this is a philosophy that we hold close at joni.
Giving isn’t subtraction. When you invest in someone’s ability to show up fully, you don’t lose something. You create something. The return simply shows up in places most balance sheets weren’t designed to track.
joni was built on exactly that premise and is the fundamental premise of our mission.
When joni launched in 2020, the question wasn’t simply what products to make. Period care itself isn’t particularly complicated. The deeper question was why our public spaces — workplaces, schools, stadiums, community centres — were designed as though menstruation wasn’t part of the human experience at all.
Somewhere along the way, period care got classified as a luxury. A personal expense. A private matter you were expected to manage before arriving at work, school or the gym.
The Hidden Cost of Treating Periods as an Afterthought
The consequences of classifying period care as an afterthought or a luxury item in public spaces are subtle — until you start paying attention. They look like the girl who quietly skips out on her soccer training because her family can’t afford period care. The woman who steps out of a meeting and has to leave work to purchase products because they don’t stock them in the office. Or the traveller who got caught off guard at her work trip and has to call the front desk asking if they have period care available at the front office.
There’s no single villain here. Just the slow, cumulative cost of a system that didn’t consider that more than 30% of the population menstruates.
A widely cited survey conducted by Harris Interactive for the Free the Tampon Foundation found that 86% of menstruators have started their period unexpectedly in public without the products they needed. Of those, 62% reported not having period care on hand, while 34% said they had gone home at least once because of it.
Eighty-six percent is not a niche statistic. It’s a near-universal experience.
Which means the issue was never really about personal preparedness. It was about infrastructure.
We built buildings filled with expectations — for productivity, participation, performance — and then quietly decided that almost half the workforce should manage a biological reality on their own time and their own dime. And also do it secretly with a smile on their face.
We created joni from the premise that this was a design flaw that could and needed to be fixed.
Walking Upstream
In public health, there’s a concept called upstream intervention. The idea is simple: you can spend enormous resources pulling drowning people out of a river, or you can walk upstream and find out what’s pushing them in.
Providing accessible period care, when you examine it closely, is an upstream intervention.
When an organization installs a period care dispenser in its washroom — stocked with products that are safe for bodies and better for the planet — it isn’t a charitable gesture. It’s correcting a design gap. It’s walking upstream.
It’s also an example of something joni believes deeply in: regeneration.
Where sustainability asks how we reduce harm, regeneration asks how we actively give back — restoring balance for people, communities, and the planet. It’s the idea that systems should leave things better than they found them.
The returns from that kind of thinking rarely show up in dramatic headlines. They look almost invisible.
A student who doesn’t miss class stays caught up. A worker who doesn’t miss out on a day of work can pay rent. An athlete who isn’t sidelined stays competitive.
Individually, these look like small moments. But multiplied across thousands of institutions and millions of people (and cycles), they add up to something enormous.
Infrastructure for Athletes
That thinking extends into sports as well. joni has helped stock washrooms with period care through partnerships with the Northern Super League, Canada’s first professional women’s soccer league. The same approach supported athletes at the 2025 Canada Games in St John’s, ensuring young competitors have access to period products as part of the infrastructure of sport (which was the first time ever that a Canada Games considered offering period care).
Because performance shouldn’t hinge on whether someone had the right supplies in their gym bag that day.
Closing the Loop
There’s a paradox at the centre of joni’s business model that’s worth sitting with.
We donate two percent of everything we sell. To date, that’s more than a million products distributed through food banks, shelters, community organizations and grassroots partners across Canada.
Traditional business logic would frame that as a cost — a subtraction.
But the joni model reflects a regenerative mindset: when value flows back into communities, it doesn’t disappear. It multiplies.
The real question becomes: what does it cost a society when people can’t fully show up?
Dignity has a return on investment. It’s simply one that most accounting systems weren’t built to measure.
joni’s partnerships with organizations like Food Banks Canada, The Period Purse, and Mamas for Mamas aren’t marketing arrangements. They’re what happens when you take the toilet paper logic seriously.
If access to period care is infrastructure, the next question becomes obvious: who is currently outside that infrastructure?
The answer, consistently, is the most vulnerable people in any community.
Which means the two-percent model isn’t charity. It’s closing a loop.
Equity Means Having a Choice
There’s another quiet assumption embedded in many giving models: that generosity means accepting less. That the product donated doesn’t need to be of quality and that someone getting the donation should just be grateful for what is available.
At joni, we reject that idea outright.
As a competitive swimmer growing up, I needed tampons. But oftentimes, the donated products were pads. Unfortunately, swimming with a pad is not really an option. Being able to have a choice when it comes to the period care you use is a critical part of menstrual justice. At joni, we believe having access to plant-based products free from harmful chemicals should not be a luxury.
We love that the organic bamboo pad or organic cotton tampon going into a stadium dispenser, a school washroom, or a donation program is the exact same product someone might buy online or in a retail store. It’s a small decision that reflects a larger belief: equity means providing people with a dignified choice vs a take-what-you-can-get approach.
That distinction matters.
Why Accountability Matters
This is where B Corp certification becomes relevant and not in the way most companies talk about it.
Lots of organizations claim values. They print them on walls, add them to annual reports, or reference them in marketing campaigns. But values are easy. What’s harder is inviting someone else to measure them.
B Corp certification is essentially an audit. It’s the difference between saying you do something (greenwashing) versus having a third-party rate you on what you say you do (accountability).
For joni, that accountability matters because the alternative has a name: purpose-washing and greenwashing. Dressing ordinary business practices in the language of purpose or sustainability without doing the work to back them up.
Third-party verification doesn’t eliminate greenwashing or purposewashing from the world, but it does make it harder to hide.
Leadership Shaped by Experience
And then there’s the question of who is doing this work in the first place.
Seventy-one percent of joni’s team are women. That statistic isn’t offered as proof of good intentions. It’s simply the operating reality of the organization.
The people designing the products, building the partnerships, and deciding where the two percent goes are overwhelmingly people who have lived the problem the company exists to solve.
Leadership shaped by lived experience tends to ask different questions.
Questions like: why do we treat period care as charity instead of infrastructure?
The men on the team play an important role as well. Not as allies performing allyship, but as partners who understand that building equitable systems benefits everyone and choose to be part of the solution.
Redesigning the Building
Which brings us back to International Women’s Day and the deceptively simple phrase: Give to Gain.
The traditional model of generosity asks what we are willing to sacrifice.
The more interesting question might be what we’re leaving on the table by not giving in the first place.
The girl who stays in school. The woman who stays in the room. The athlete who stays on the field.
These aren’t abstract outcomes. They’re the accumulated return on one of the world’s most overlooked infrastructure investments.
The toilet paper test remains a simple one.
Walk into the washroom and ask yourself whether toilet paper is there because someone was generous or because the building was designed by people who understood what a building is for. People.
joni is in the business of redesigning the bathroom for every body.
And if B Corp Month and International Women’s Day asks anything of us, it’s this: to recognize that better systems don’t appear by accident. They are built by people willing to question the assumptions baked into the ones we inherited.
When we design systems that work for every body, something powerful happens.
Everyone gains.