Lunapads Blog

As regular readers will be aware, over the past decade Lunapads has been developing the Pads4Girls program to bring reusable feminine hygiene supply kits to thousands of girls and women in need in over 15 countries. Pads4Girls seeks to address an often-overlooked problem that hundreds of millions of girls and women in developing nations face: missing school or work for several days every month because they lack adequate menstrual hygiene supplies. You can learn more about the issue and its impact on our site here, and in the Pads4Girls section of our blog.

Trying to determine how to make a bigger impact with Pads4Girls from a distance only goes so far, and we feel called to learn more and go deeper. In January 2012 Suzanne and I will be traveling to Uganda with Shanti Uganda, a Vancouver-based charity that improves infant and maternal health, provides safe women-centered care and supports the well-being of birthing mothers and women living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda.

We are appealing to the Lunapads community to raise funds to enroll 300 teenage girls in Shanti Uganda’s At Risk Girls Program, a health and wellness program focused on inspiring futures for girls and teen mothers in Kasana Town Uganda. As part of the workshop, each girl will receive AFRIpads (Ugandan-made cloth pads based on Lunapads, see below for more information about them) and a health education manual.

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Hi everybody, Lisa here! Our most recent guest post from Samson (read here)  has motivated me to share some of my own thoughts and an explanation / followup to the note on gender that I added to our website recently.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s the note:

Lunapads users and community members are cisgender, transgender, genderqueer and transsexual individuals who span the gender spectrum. Due to the nature of our products, cisgender women comprise the majority of our customer base. However, we are committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming space for all those seeking eco friendly solutions to their everyday and monthly needs.

Being mindful of gender essentialist & exclusionary comments made about periods and bodies – and the real & lasting impact those words and assumptions have  – is important to me, both in and outside of my work here at Lunapads.  Avoiding framing conversations in ways that make others feel unrecognized or overlooked matters to me, to my community, to my family, and to many of our customers. I care about what we say and how we say it because I believe that exclusion in language equals exclusion in practice.

In understanding that many individual’s realities are far more complex than traditional gender constructs would have us believe, I think we can find new, meaningful ways to relate to and support each other — strengthening our communities and expanding the narrow confines of who’s given access to improved health, comfort and support in relation to their own menstrual cycles and bodies.

My hope is that we can provide space within the Lunapads community for those who menstruate and feel unrepresented or overlooked in conversations about menstruation. While most women menstruate at some point in their lives, the ways in which those cycles are experienced varies so widely depending on a number of  factors.  Furthermore, having a period is not something exclusive to those who are women — nor do all women menstruate or share the same feelings about their bodies, fertility, sexuality, and so on.

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Yesterday we had the extraordinary good fortune to be visited by some remarkable people working for change for Ethiopians, the leaders of Partners in the Horn of Africa, and Hope for Children.

Yewoinshet Masresha is an engaging and charismatic Ethiopian woman and the founder of Hope for Children, an organization which has received worldwide attention for its pioneering work in the care of women and children affected by HIV/AIDS.

A social activist from her early teens, Yewoinshet joined the Red Cross at age 17 during a period of political instability and war in Ethiopia. When she refused to marry a high ranking military official she was imprisoned in solitary confinement for three years. She emerged with a renewed strength and commitment to help women and children in need. The impact of  HIV/AIDS was having a profound effect on the country and many children were losing one or both parents to the virus. It was in response to this HIV/AIDS crisis that Yewoinshet founded Hope for Children, the first NGO in Ethiopia dedicated to the care of children affected by HIV/AIDS.

Yewoinshet shared her personal story with us firsthand, as well as describing life for most women and girls in Ethiopia. In many communities, for example, girls are expected to wash male visitors’ feet, and are given undesirable bits of meat, while their brothers receive choicer pieces. Education for girls is widely seen as being pointless, since they will end up married often before they even reach puberty. Yewoinshet also described a deeply negative and shame-based culture around menstruation, and the devastating effect that it has on girls’ self-esteem and education (a sadly familiar story, which for our part we are seeking to address in various nations via our Pads4Girls program.)

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I am all for Modern Art and think MoMa’s current exhibit, Talk to Me, on how our fast changing world is always in communication with us is brilliant.  As much as I am one of those who need to get out of the city every couple of weeks to recharge in nature, I love and value technology too.

My response to Ms. Magazine’s post about one of the pieces in this show, the Menstruation Machine, was a feeling in my belly much worse than your average period cramps.  The piece itself is extremely intelligently built, designed to dispense blood and stimulate the lower abdomen in a way that would feel something like menstrual cramping.  The artist, Sputniko, wants to allow men and anyone else (children or post menopausal women) to be able to experience menstruation and point out to all of us who are still bleeding for 3-7 days every month that this is an outdated and unnecessary part of being a woman.  “It’s 2011, so why are humans still menstruating?”

I am all for modern art and design but let’s not neglect the greatest designer there is, nature.  In case you missed Biology 101, women are designed with an incredible ability and purpose to birth babies.  Even if you choose not to experience childbirth or motherhood directly this time around, there is a place where we need to remember and acknowledge the creative power that comes with that gift.  To quote one of the greatest midwives of our time, Ina May Gaskin, “There is no other organ quite like the uterus. If men had such an organ, they would brag about it. So should we.”  Sputniko has another piece called Child Producing Machine, a song for girls who would rather become a cyborg than to cope with menstruation pain.  “If I have to suffer with my biology – I’d rather be a Cyborg than a goddess.”

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To say that we were blown away by the response to our LunaRevolution Video Festival & Contest is a seismic understatement – it was literally one “WOW” after another at yesterday’s staff viewing. Thank you so much to all of you who participated; we are deeply honored by your efforts.

The overall experience has been more complex than “WOW” suggests, however, and I want to address that it was not as easy as sitting down with a bowl of popcorn and basking in the Luna-love. I cannot go any further without first acknowledging the efforts of Nancee, our Video Intern (here for her second summer, woot!) and our IT wonder Lisa. Nancee is a fabulous tech-geek workaholic super-smart/nice person who is constantly seeking more ways to be helpful (if you can’t think of them, she will!) and then executing them with dizzying speed and efficiency. With equal dedication the perennially brilliant Lisa waded through the maze of technical issues with her consistently calm and sensible demeanor.

Clever Lunagals and all, were there flaws? Oh yeah! We have not had a video contest in years, and naturally technology has advanced a notch or two. We decided to go with a Facebook application called Wildfire, which involved a bit of a learning curve and proved to have its shortcomings. Thank you to all of you who were smart enough to point out the not-totally-clear bits and have been patient enough to bear with us while we worked it out.

We received 21 (TWENTY ONE!!!) submissions, which we considered to be totally amazing. Twenty-one Lunagals felt inspired enough to take the time to tell us how our products have changed your lives: how incredible is that?!?

It was a massive challenge to choose the top picks, and if we have any regrets it’s that we didn’t create more categories and/or Honorable Mention spots in the first place (it would have looked pretty silly if we had created a dozen categories and only had three submissions, for example). Finally, we didn’t all agree about, for example, what made a video particularly “creative”, and so I want to highlight what we felt was uniquely awesome about the videos that may not have fit into a particular category.

Our 5 Honorable Mention Prizes:
another drum roll, please…

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Lunapads was so proud to host this year’s LunaRevolution Video Festival and Contest! The contest was a highlight of our summer and we hope you all enjoyed it just as much as we did.

Since the voting period ended, we have been busy in the office watching (and re-watching!) all the videos and trying to pick out the winners. We felt every video was superb in its own way and deserved recognition. You all did an amazing job, and made it extremely difficult for us to choose the winning submissions – more on that in our next post!

Alas, winners had to be selected – and so without further ado *drum roll please*

To be clear about how the winners were chosen: the People’s Choice awards were based solely on the number of votes through Wildfire. The Most Creative, Staff Pick and Honorable Mentions were chosen based on lengthy conversation and general consensus between the Lunagals. That said, as the song goes, “Everyone’s a winner, Baby” (didn’t take 1 of the top 8 prize-winning spots? keep reading!) – please check out all of the entries, and share your favorites with your friends!

The fact that Ashley’s video got so many votes speaks for itself – she was the hands down People’s Choice winner. Our Staff Pick went to Carla. We loved her funky editing style, amazing facial expressions and irresistible enthusiasm and charisma. Top it off with a wonderful musical choice at the end, and you’ve got a winner. DIVA!!! We chose Nicole’s video as Most Creative due to her choice of a multiple interview style, great music, and totally authentic girlfriend conversation about all the stuff us Lunagals dislike about disposables. A little something awesome for everyone!

Aside from announcing the top winners, we would really like to give a shout out to our People’s Choice runners-up. In fact, the top 3 contenders were so close in votes we couldn’t believe it! Coming in with the 2nd most votes was long-time Lunapads fan Holly Pluchinski, followed very closely behind by Kendra Gabert. Excellent work, ladies!

Stay tuned for Madeleine’s follow-up blog post naming our 5 honorable mention prize winners, as well as special mentions for everyone else who participated! For those who did not win, keep an eye on your mailboxes for a thank you treat from all of us here at Lunapads! Please send your mailing address tous at info@lunapads.com (use the subject “Lunapads Video Contest: My Address!”)

Everyone give a final round applause for these lovely ladies and their video creations – and don’t forget to share your favorites with your friends.

Want more video fun? We got you covered. Subscribe to our Lunapads YouTube Channel today for videos on reusable menstrual products, women in business and how-to’s. Thanks again so much from all of us at Lunapads!

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One of the most exciting new directions for Pads4Girls these days is that we are creating relationships to facilitate learning about how to make pads, in addition to sending them over from Canada. There is much more news to come on this front, but in the meantime here is a wonderful example that is particularly poignant because of the involvement of a group of girls in Vancouver rallying to support girls in Kenya, via the US Peace Corps.

A dear and longtime girlfriend of mine has been working as a Girl Guides and Pathfinder Leader for the past decade. She brought her troup of ten 12-14 year old girls, the #4 Vancouver Pathfinder Unit, to visit Lunapads recently. The girls were particularly taken with Pads4Girls (I had shown them our video about it when I attended one of their meetings last year), and they surprised me with a wonderful donation of $140 that they had earned via babysitting.

Fate had it that a few days later we received a request from Helen McGuirk, a US Peace Corps volunteer, requesting help with finding donations to help her teach a group of girls in Kenya how to make their own pads. They needed $344 to complete the funding, and so we took the $140 the Pathfinders had raised and made up the difference ourselves. Please read Helen’s email below about the project to see what can happen when girls and women come together for a common cause.

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As you may remember from a previous post a few weeks ago, we have been working in partnership with The Mariposa DR Foundation and The POWER project, a group of students from Seattle, to provide girls in the Dominican Republic with Pads4Girls Kits.

The 200 Kits arrived on April 6th! The Mariposas have posted a slew of gorgeous photos of the girls at the Puerto Cabarete school receiving the kits on their Facebook Page.

We are so proud and grateful for this incredible opportunity to support girls’ education. Thank you, Mariposas!

Related articles

• Our biggest Pads4Girls shipment! (lunapads.com)

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Inspired by my courage to talk about lubes in my last post, I’m now going to talk about (are you ready?) orgasms! Yikes, what’s going on with me? Well, I think I am going to chalk it up to the new found freedom of hitting my forties and realizing that there are fewer sacred cows out there. Life is too short to worry about what other people think; I’ve come to realize that at this stage of my life it is more important to find ways to enjoy life, and, if I can, speak out for the benefit of women who are listening!

What has got me riled up lately is my interest in the new documentary Orgasm Inc.

“Extraordinary behind-the-scenes access reveals a drug company’s fevered race to develop the first FDA-approved Viagra for women – and offers a humorous but sobering look inside the cash-fueled pharmaceutical industry.” – Hot Docs Film Festival

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Further to my earlier post in this series about women’s “hip” (read inner mojo) power, I’d like to share a couple of examples from a more creative perspective.

I recently revisited Lucille Clifton’s classic poem “homage to my hips” and felt compelled to share it for those who have not yet had the pleasure. Please check it out – this is such a powerful message about women’s power and body positivity.

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