Theodora Lee is a YouTuber, blogger, copywriter and business owner specializing in digital content creation. If you haven’t yet, visit her blog and YouTube channel.

Theodora explains her role in The Lily Cup Project below:

As a South African advice and lifestyle YouTuber with over 200K subscribers, giving back is part of what I do. With a fairly affluent international audience, I think it’s important to leverage my views for positive change, beyond self and career gain.

I’m also a proud South African and a woman. Something I feel strongly about is menstrual health. I have an entire YouTube playlist dedicated to periods! When I speak about that ‘time of the month’ online, I speak as though we can all afford the luxury of sanitary products each month. When I learned how many girls in South Africa can’t afford sanitary products and are suffering each month, because of something so natural, I wanted to do something. I needed to raise awareness about what many of us haven’t stopped to think about before.
So I teamed up with a Swedish menstrual cup company called Intimina. They make reusable menstrual cups that can be used for up to 10 years! I told them about the situation and how I wanted to make a change and empower women who are using newspapers, re-using dirty pads and getting unsafe and untested injections to ‘make their shameful periods disappear.’ Thankfully, Intimina jumped on board and decided to donate 4000 Lily Cup Compacts to the cause in exchange for an awareness video.

I needed to get my audience involved in some way and I knew that distributing 4000 cups would take more than just simply handing them over. So I thought I’d start a fundraising campaign to help with additional costs. Money needed to be raised to help NGOs Bunang Baswa and The Dream Factory (NGOs I selected at the start of the project) to distribute the cups, along with highly important education on how to use them and period health in general.

My viewers were moved by the video and jumped at the opportunity to help. Within a few days we reached our target of $2500 and the number keeps climbing. The money can now also be used for supplying every girl with new panties and soap when they receive a Lily Cup after the workshop we’re currently putting together to educate and uplift the girls on menstrual and sexual health.

Moreover, we hope to empower these girls and inspire mentorship in their own communities surrounding the taboo topic of periods. We want people to speak out and in a way become proud and stand up for their periods.

Even though The Lily Cup Project is empowering 4000 girls, which is incredible, I want the word to spread. I want Lily Cup Project to create waves and inspire simple, yet impactful changes in SA, like free bathroom dispensaries to include sanitary products and not just condoms. That would be something…