In her eighth grade year, when she saw classmates stop eating lunch at school due to COVID-19 interruptions to the free and reduced lunch program, senior Veda Kommineni took the next step. She implemented a food pantry at Liberty Middle School – the same initiative that has grown into the comprehensive resource center at EHS called the Care Closet.
Taking steps is all Kommineni seems to do – whether it’s up the ranks of varsity tennis, toward a new project for her robotics team, forward on yearbook pages as editor-in-chief or into a better future for menstrual equity through legislative action and activism. Her reputation (or rather her resume) precedes her, distinguishing Kommineni from many of her bright-minded peers at EHS. She’s the one who does everything.
So when she got the news that she was one of the 0.1% of applicants to be named a 2025 Coca-Cola Scholar, one of the most prestigious honors available to high school seniors, it only made sense that she took just a few minutes to celebrate with her family before hurrying out the door to get to practice for EHS’s Ethics Bowl team. Standing in her kitchen in a pink striped sweater, she leaned over the counter to open the email, let her jaw drop, threw her disbelieving head in her hands and jumped up and down. And then she got in the car and got on with her afternoon.
Growing up, Kommineni’s mother would tell her stories about menstruation in India – memories of students missing class monthly at her all-girls school because they easily bled through their makeshift pads, unable to access the sanitary, disposable ones commonplace in the U.S.
“So many things already stand in the way of girls getting the education they deserve and need,” Kommineni said. “I can’t fathom that something as natural as a period could contribute to that.”
Motivated by her resentment of period poverty and social taboos around discussing menstruation, which she said are especially strong in India, Kommineni went a step beyond just making pads and tampons available in the Care Closet. In 2019, she became the first intern at a menstrual equity organization called I Support the Girls, where she worked with Director Alicia Alexander to educate herself, host period-packing parties and become a lead volunteer.
When she was ready to host a period-packing party on her own, she did it through the Care Closet. Baskets for donated pads and tampons slowly filled up – with much begging from Kommineni on the announcements – in the school library. Dr. Alexander provided makeup bags to hold the sanitary products. When it was time for the party, Kommineni put all the pads on one side of a long table in the media center and all the tampons on the other. Care Closet volunteers circled the table and stuffed them.
“I started playing some Taylor Swift, and it was like an assembly line, and that worked really well,” Kommineni said. “A lot of the girls and guys got to know a little bit more about what period poverty looks like as we were doing this, and it was something that was very hands-on. That has always been important to me, especially as I lead my own club and service-oriented group.”
One of Kommineni’s proudest moments was hosting a similar party in the basement of her Hindu temple.
“There tends to be a lot of stigma regarding menstruation in Hinduism, and it was a big step to do something for periods in the basement of a place of worship. ” Kommineni said. “There’s this assumption in several religions that when a woman is on her period, she is considered dirty.”
Kommineni’s Hindu faith and passion for menstrual equity sometimes come into conflict, but as a second-generation immigrant from India, she said her experience of Hinduism has been one of open arms and a disregard for gender-based exclusion. She wants more people to see that side of the religion.
“I still make it a priority to respect my religion in the sense that I do not worship on my period,” she said. “But I do want to make sure we understand why that exists in scriptures, why we need to do our part in making sure that women don’t have to face period poverty and how those two issues are distinct from one another.”
The summer after her sophomore year, Kommineni traveled to India, as she does most summers. But this time, she organized and launched her own initiative out of ISTG called Pads for Progress. She’d collected three suitcases full of menstrual products and brought them with her to give to a homeless shelter.
And after that, there were more steps to take. Kommineni is the sole 2024-25 Illinois ambassador for the Pad Project, a global initiative against period poverty. She’s the only teenage member of a board called She Votes Illinois – a position for which Dr. Alexander recommended her – which campaigns and lobbies for women’s rights. On the board, she advocated for Illinois House bills 3093 and 156, both supporting period product distribution efforts.
After Gov. JB Pritzker signed a bill that mandated free menstrual products in public school bathrooms for students fourth to 12th grade, SVI noticed a 75% noncompliance rate, according to Kommineni. With other members of the board, she drafted a handbook instructing schools on what they need to supply their menstruators with and where they can get the resources.
“I was super grateful and happy that that law was passed, but the problem if we don’t have compliance with it is that people still aren’t getting the period products they need,” Kommineni said.
There’s no peek behind the curtains of Kommineni’s high school success story, no tips or tricks to managing the load that she does. She’s naturally calculating when it comes to commitments, always strategic with time management. She’ll admit that she’s exactly what she appears to be on face value: an instinctually productive person.
“If I had to give you a guide on how to balance [things] the way I have, I’m not sure I could,” Kommineni said. “I need to go get food with people. I need to spend my weekends doing things. But at the same time, I’ve never hesitated to understand my priority rankings. I’ve never hesitated to skip out on attending a dinner with my friends to finish an essay that I needed to do.”
People might assume she’s chronically exhausted. She thinks they often buy into a misconception that all Indian parents are hard on their kids – that she’s been pressured into working for things she doesn’t want. Kommineni said it’s the opposite. If there’s anything resembling a secret to her success, it’s that she always pursued what she’s passionate about.
“I always did what I enjoyed, even [packing period products] on my living room floor every Sunday morning,” Kommineni said. “I enjoyed spending 20-plus hours a week playing tennis. I felt satisfaction when papers were handed back to me and I had good grades on them. I liked all of that, and it was never an attempt to make other people or even myself proud.”
She counts herself lucky for the hand she was dealt in terms of parents. From hauling supplies into the car with her to ferrying her from one activity to another, she said they stood by and supported her when needed.
When she came home with a rare B on her band progress report in fourth grade, she remembers her dad sitting down with her and explaining that he wasn’t angry about the grade. He just knew she hadn’t been trying hard in band class. He told her it was a much scarier thing to fail to put forth effort than it is to get a B.
“I think that conversation with him really changed the way I view things,” Kommineni said. “I have definitely done bad on assignments in school, and I haven’t always been a perfect A-plus student or whatever. But I think my parents always knew that I was driven, and if I wanted it, I would.”
“Coca-Cola Scholarship Recipient” might be the shiniest line on Kommineni’s resume, but, all in all, it’s simply a recognition of her work – just about 2500 volunteer hours of it – in many other positions. She’s one of the almost 105,000 teens to apply for the scholarship and one of only 150 to win. But she’s also a District 7 Student Advisory Board member and Science National Honor Society president. She’s the student who became the youngest intern in the U.S. Attorney’s office of the Department of Justice and won an award for her public service there.
When racking up volunteer hours and packing her schedule, Kommineni wasn’t necessarily thinking about Coca-Cola. In fact, she didn’t decide to apply until the summer before her senior year.
The application process was lengthy, and it came in stages: clubs and activities, then essays, then an interview. She could have been cut at any stage, and was continually shocked when she opened her email to find she’d progressed.
The last stage, the interview, was in her bag. She was confident – and became even more so when one of the women interviewing her said she was a menstrual equity activist, too. She’d done work in the same field Kommineni had been fighting for throughout high school.
When the interview was over, Kommineni ran to her dad, told him she thought it went great but didn’t want to get her hopes up. A few days later, she was a Coke Scholar.
Now, Kommineni is looking forward to the all-expenses-paid trip she’ll make to the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta later this spring for a leadership conference. She’s been DMing other scholars on Instagram, exploring all the avenues this award has opened for her.
“I was excited to be a Coke scholar, but I am more excited for the opportunity to engage with other Coke Scholars,” Kommineni said. “Coke Scholars are hand picked by people who are leaders in their own generation because of the potential in us, because they see a drive to invoke change. I think I will be brought to the best version of myself when I am surrounded by people who have that same mindset.”