During the pandemic, I reached out to a friend I made through a college ambassadorship we both did in Philadelphia for the startup Twentyeight Health. We both felt like many women’s health topics were stigmatized and not adequately discussed among our peers.
So, we decided to start an Instagram page to “sync” candidly with others on seemingly taboo topics, like periods, sexual health, mental health, and more. We believed in creating a safe space to chat and educate each other on our bodies.
Ultimately, our guiding question for Let’s Sync was: how might we encourage, educate, and support young women and gender minorities on gender + health topics?
We planned Instagram post content series based on topics we ourselves wanted to learn about and wished we had known more about, everything from how to approach an OBGYN appointment, sustainable period products to try, personal stories around vaginismus, vocabulary around relationship abuse, interviews with our moms on their first periods, and more.
We experimented on how to present such information and learned how our audience—other mainly women Gen Zers—engaged with health content on Instagram.
We have been lucky to work with 7 volunteer team members, collaborate with 6 other content creators and/or brands on content or giveaways, and get interviewed on 2 podcasts. During 1.5 years, we created 140 pieces of post content together for 1600+ followers, which I feel so proud of.
In addition to regular posts, we hosted regular Instagram Live discussions, posted weekly Instagram stories like Monday News (updates on gender + health related news), created Reels/TikToks, started an Advice Column, and started a community chat forum via Geneva.
While the project is on hiatus at the moment, we feel grateful for all it has brought us. I got to meet so many passionate and caring people, learn a lot about women’s health and content creation, and help generate community and conversation around important health topics.
I found myself in my ~ flow state ~ whenever I was working on Let’s Sync and hope to re-engage with this kind of work again very soon.