The fundamental question is this: why should retirement signal the end of a person's capacity to contribute meaningfully to the world? Janelle Dodd posed a different kind of answer when she decided that her post-work years would centre on an issue most people barely discuss: menstrual health.
As leader of the Days For Girls team in Ryde, Ms Dodd has built something remarkable out of what might have been quiet evenings and gardening projects. What began as an individual passion evolved into a practical movement addressing one of the globe's most overlooked human rights crises.
Consider the scale of the challenge she took on.Around 800 million girls and women worldwide lack access to sufficient sanitary products, instead using unhygienic alternatives including corn husks, mattress stuffing and grass. These inadequate substitutes carry profound consequences.Internationally, participation in education is about the same proportion of boys to girls at primary-school level, but at high school level, girls' participation can drop by up to 70 per cent. The barrier is often not intellectual capacity but period poverty.
The counter-argument deserves serious consideration: why should a retired individual concern herself with a global problem when local needs go unmet? The answer reveals the sophistication of Days For Girls' approach.The organisation makes and distributes reusable sanitary products for women in disadvantaged and remote communities. By providing sustainable, dignified solutions rather than disposable band-aids, it addresses both immediate material need and long-term environmental impact.
But the issue runs deeper than product access.In many communities, menstruating girls and women are isolated from their families due to beliefs about menstruation being a source of danger; these myths and taboos are dangerous to girls and women, affecting their wellbeing, health, lifestyles and capacity to care for their families. Strip away the talking points and what remains is a straightforward human rights matter. Education is not a luxury; it is essential infrastructure.
Ms Dodd and her Ryde team have made 5,500 kits since forming in 2014, and they hold four community workshops every month alongside running programmes for 11 local schools. This is not large-scale charity in the abstract sense. This is measurable, community-embedded work.Since 2008, Days For Girls has distributed 2.1 million sanitary kits through an international network of 50,000 volunteers.
The tension in menstrual health advocacy is this: advocacy organisations operate from a conviction that menstruation should no longer be shameful or hidden. Yet much of their work necessarily occurs quietly, in workshops and community spaces, gradually shifting cultural norms. It is unglamorous work, often led by volunteers unpaid and unheralded.
That Dodd chose to spend her retirement years on this mission suggests something worth reflecting on. History may judge this moment by whether societies acted on the evidence: that girls kept in school become educated women, that educated women improve entire communities, and that access to menstrual products and knowledge is foundational to all of it. Dodd appears to have already made her own judgment about what matters.