An Academy Award-winning producer for Best Documentary Short (2019) for PERIOD. END OF SENTENCE., Melissa Berton is a social activist, speaker, and educator. She is the Founder & Executive Director of The Pad Project. The Pad Project is a global non-profit dedicated to the principle that “a period should end a sentence, not a girl’s education.” The Pad Project partners in fifteen countries to provide access to menstrual health products and education. In 2021, Berton was named to the inaugural list of Forbes’s 50 Over 50 Dreamers & Doers: Women Making Social Impact. She is a Los Angeles based educator, speaker, and writer. Melissa teaches English at Oakwood School in North Hollywood, where The Pad Project began, and where she annually leads the largest student delegation to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. In recognition of her human rights work and mobilization of youth advocates to promote menstrual equity, Berton received the 2019 Eleanor Roosevelt Global Women’s Rights Award, and the 2023 Last Girl Award to end human trafficking.