Team Period began with a friend in pain and grew into a campaign that has now won international recognition. Aadvik Jain, 18, from Delhi, was named among 198 young people from 44 countries honoured with the Diana Award, announced at a virtual ceremony on 4 November 2026. Team Period is the group Jain founded to challenge the stigma around periods, and the award places its work among the social action projects recognised in the name of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The Diana Award was established in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales, and it recognises people aged 16 to 25 for social action and humanitarian work. India accounted for 49 honorees, nearly a quarter of the total of 198. Jain founded the group in 2024 with three friends from Amity International School in Delhi: Shivansh Arora, Aaratrika Jha Anand and Navya Manglik. The four of them were school students when they started, and the work has grown from a school project into a wider campaign.
How Team Period started
The work began when Jain was 14 and a close friend suffered severe menstrual pain during midterm examinations in 2023 that was not taken seriously. The friend was later diagnosed with PCOS, now referred to as PMOS, polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, and doctors also investigated endometriosis. She had irregular periods and severe cramps for six to eight months, and the experience showed Jain how little was said about menstrual pain and how easily it was dismissed.
That experience set the direction for Team Period. Rather than treating periods as a private matter to be hidden, the four friends decided to talk about them openly in school and in the neighbourhoods around it. The friend’s pain had not been taken seriously at school, and the diagnosis that followed showed how much had been missed. The aim was to change how students, teachers and parents spoke about periods, and to make it easier for girls to ask for help when pain or bleeding made school hard to attend.
What Team Period does in schools
Team Period challenges menstrual stigma through workshops, street performances, awareness campaigns and efforts to improve access to menstrual pads and products. It holds separate discussion sessions for boys and girls before bringing them together, so that each group can ask questions freely first and then talk together about what they have heard. Bringing boys and girls together after the separate sessions lets both sides hear the same facts and ask questions in front of each other. The street performances take the subject out of the classroom and into public space, where the stigma is most visible.
Team Period has collected about 4,000 survey responses from students, parents and the wider community. After a campaign about red stains on school uniforms, many students said in a follow-up survey that they felt less shame about a visible period stain. The change was small and concrete: a stain that had once meant embarrassment and a wish to hide became something students felt they could face without shame.
Pads, dispensers and plans for new chapters
Team Period installed a sanitary pad dispenser at its school and works in Delhi government schools, orphanages and underserved neighbourhoods. The dispenser gives students a reliable source of pads inside the school, and the work outside the school takes the same message to children who may have less access to products and to information. The plans now include local chapters with volunteers who speak regional languages, so that the work can reach students in their own language and in their own area. Volunteers who speak regional languages would let the group work in more parts of the city and beyond it.
Jain is set to start studying medicine and public health at the University of Bologna in Italy in February. The course fits the work Team Period has done, which sits between health and public life, and the Diana Award, announced on 4 November 2026, gives that work a public record that will travel with Jain to Bologna and beyond.