It was an email the young hero received following a game of lacrosse that led her to learn of the GoFundMe honor. She said her mother encouraged her to respond to the email.

“I got the email after a game—Like I was at a lacrosse game. I check my phone—I’m a 17-year-old girl; if you know, 17-year-olds, we don’t check our emails. Like, what is an email?” McCowan said. “And so I read [email] it on the bus. I was like—I read the email. I was like, ‘okay, I’m gonna just go tell my mom about it.’ So I’m driving home from school with my mom—from her picking me up from the game in the middle of the night. And so I’m reading this email to her, and she’s getting really, really excited.”

McCowan said that her mother was insistent that this was important, and it wasn’t until she noticed how excited her mother was that she too became excited about it.

“And I’m like, ‘why are you getting so excited?’ I just thought it was a little email. And so she’s getting me more excited, and she’s like ‘respond right away. Like, come on, like you wanna do this; this is important,’” McCowan said. And I’m like, ‘oh, okay.’ And I didn’t understand how important it was and how this [sic] is gonna help my service project until my mom started getting excited about it.”

The GoFundMe email arrived at a time of disappointment for McCowan; she was unable to attend the national competition to present her project to a school organization due to the snowstorm.

This Texas teen founded The Confident Girl Project to help get period products to those in need. pic.twitter.com/QMHL2FYuEm

— GoFundMe (@gofundme) April 7, 2022

“I was really excited cause I was really bummed about—I presented this project to a school organization, and I was going to nationals with the project, and unfortunately, I could not go to nationals because there was a snowstorm in my area,” McCowan said. “I was so bummed. Like I was like, ‘oh my gosh, like I just wanna end the project. I just wanna finish, I’m done.’ And once I got that email, I was like, ‘oh, I can continue forward. I do whatever I want now. I’m, I’m finishing my project. I can give out so many more things.’ And so yeah, it was really exciting once I got to figure out what it was.”