Lunapads Blog

Back in October we received a donation request from Project Thrive, an organization that has been working hard to provide girls and women all over Africa with washable pads through their Days for Girls program. As you may recall, Lunapads helped out in getting The Days for Girls project started and we have been overjoyed to watch it grow over the years since. They accept donations of commercial and home-sewn cloth pads and other supplies to create “Hygiene Kits” for the girls. We were happy to offer them 35 pairs of Lunapanties and 500 Liner Inserts to help them meet their goal for the latest distribution.

Celeste from Project Thrive sent us the following story of how the distribution of the Kits in one community opened the door to discussion around FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) and ultimately led to the abandonment of the practice.

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As many of you are already aware, Lunapads offers cost-priced Pads4Girls Kits that can be purchased by customers, which are then given to girls and birthing women in Africa.  The way it works is that we are approached by individuals or NGOs who work with girls and women in need (Imagine1Day Ethiopia and Shanti Uganda are two Vancouver-based examples) who we then add to the list of potential recipients for customer donations. Customers buy the kits, and we give them to the groups who then distribute them to the recipients – all good.

That said, like so many other things in life, Pads4Girls isn’t perfect.  First, the obvious problem that we can’t reach everyone who needs supplies.  Second, there are not always the necessary supporting resources available (education, water and stable living situations come to mind) in every community that make using cloth pads easy.  Finally, while Pads4Girls kits help thousands of girls and women, they are still being shipped half way around the world.  We are thrilled to tell you about a new initiative that takes this work several steps further, as well as how a little holiday gift-giving can help to support it.

Elizabeth Scharpf is as striking in person as her accomplishments and vision are on paper.  Tall, grounded, deeply compassionate and extremely smart were both my first and lasting impressions of her.  Elizabeth is the founder of Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE), a unique social profit that seeks to empower women and girls both physically and financially.

While working on economic policy (think World Bank and Clinton Foundation level) Elizabeth came to understand the impact that girls missing school and women missing work due to unmanaged menses was having.  She then asked herself what was going to make a bigger difference: the report that she was writing “that nobody was going to read anyway” (her words), or finding a way to help girls stay in school and women get back to work? Thus SHE was born.

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Frédérique and her very first handmade pad!

My name is Frédérique. I am a licensed practical nurse (LPN) and am currently going to college to become a registered nurse. I have created a project called Pads for Power. My project includes collecting disposable feminine hygiene products and donating them to homeless shelters in Vancouver. It also includes making homemade reusable pads to be sent to developing countries where many women and girls living in rural settings do not have access to feminine hygiene products. Consequently, they must stay at home and miss up to a week of work or school every single month. These contributions mean that these girls and women, both near and far, will have the freedom to go to school or work every day and, in turn, the power to achieve greater success in life.

This is the story of how this project came about:

I was given an immense amount of pads and tampons from a post-menopausal friend a few months back. I wondered what to do with all of them since I already had my own little supply and didn’t feel the need to be “ready” years in advance. I had the idea of giving them to a friend from school who would be traveling to Tanzania, Africa. She was going to help with the creation of medical and education systems in rural areas. I knew there was a great need for feminine hygiene products in these areas. Unfortunately, she had no extra space for all my pads and tampons and I had to keep them all.

Soon after, I started a self-development class (in leadership) in which one must create a community project. That is when I decided to finally do something with all those pads. I would find a way to get them to women who needed them. I knew I could increase the benefits of my project by gathering feminine hygiene products from other women and, also, creating homemade reusable pads (a more eco-friendly option).

I had read about Lunapads International in a magazine and briefly visited their site and decided to give them a call to inquire about their Pads4Girls project and their shipping process. Not only did they explain the process but they even said they would help me by sending the reusable pads I created to organizations working in foreign countries! I was delighted to hear this and have been working hard at collecting and making pads since. So far I have collected and donated just over 400 disposable pads and tampons to a local shelter but my goal is to reach and help as many women as possible both near and far.

Please send an email to padsforpower@hotmail.com if you are interested in contributing disposable feminine hygiene products, materials to make reusable pads, or would like to help sew the pads (see the video on Lunapads.com’s donate pads page). Any kind of help would be greatly appreciated.

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Good news continues to come our way about initiatives bringing cloth pads to women and girls in Africa.  As discussed in this earlier post, millions of girls and women in Africa do not have access to adequate menstrual supplies.  Sadly, girls stay home and miss important school days because they have no means to deal with their period while at school.  While Proctor and Gamble have their “protecting futures” campaign (donating disposable pads to girls, thus creating a long-term waste problem), partners in our Pads4Girls initiative provide girls in rural areas of Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya with a sustainable alternative: Lunapads!

While we recognize supplying cloth pads to girls and women is an important step, there are many others in Africa helping to take this initiative one step further.  Several colleagues of ours are building programs to train women to make the pads in their own community, thus creating employment and income for women.  Here are a few examples:

Sapna Dayal of Imagine1Day will be bringing Lunapads with her to Ethiopia in May with hopes to build skills and employment for local women to make and sell cloth pads.  When Carrie Jane Williams travelled to Uganda last fall to bring Lunapads to Uganda, she helped orchestrate the production of ”AfriPads” right there on the spot.  While she was there, she met a young couple who became so excited by what they saw, that they are now completely devoted to getting AfriPads off the ground.   Pauls Grinvalds and Sonia Klumpp have plans to launch a six-month pilot project to determine the feasiblity of manufacturing and distributing cloth pads to the girls in Kitengeesa, in the Masaka District.  Paul and Sonia’s plans were featured in one of Uganda’s national newspapers: the Daily Mirror.  Hopefully this press will stimulate greater awareness of the problem and some funding for their project.  Please pass on the word on their behalf.

Recently we learned of an even larger cloth pad manufacturing program that was inspired by Lunapads.  Last week, I attended the annual Ethiopian dinner of Partners in the Horn of Africa. This Canadian charity works in Ethiopia and directs 100% of the donations directly to projects that involve building schools, bridges, wells, and providing group homes and centres for HIV orphans.

A niece of one of the board members showed her aunt a Lunapad, and from there, the idea of replicating our cloth pads in Ethiopia took off.  In 2008, a Partners-funded pilot project manufactured and distributed 20,000 modified Lunapads and 2,500 Lunapanties for girls in a rural school district near Addis Ababa.  For every $5,000 they invested in this project, over 7,000 more school days for girls were added.  We had no idea this was happening and are so happy to hear about the trickle effect Lunapads has already made in Ethiopia.

Partners also provides microfinancing for women entrepreneurs, and a result of this pilot project they will be expanding the program to set up a manufacturing facility to make 200,000 pads and employ local women.   It was inspiring to hear John Baigent, the Executive Director of Partners, talk about the cloth pad program so passionately to a group of 200 supporters at the dinner.  I was amused to hear that John has achieved “rock star status” among the women and girls because of the profound impact the cloth pads have brought to their community.  Hmm, I’m imagining John channelling Annie Lennox and leading the girls and women in a chorus of ”Sisters are doing it for themselves!”

The Partners cloth pad pilot project was made possible by the generous donation from a group of mothers in West Vancouver called Mom and Me.  Each Mother’s Day this group holds a family dance and in 2008 they raised almost $25,000 for the Partners cloth pad initiative.  I hope to attend the event this year with my family and would love to see this fundraising model replicated everywhere.  Because Partners covers all the administrative costs, 100% of the donations go directly towards the projects they fund.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if more groups replicated this idea and supported this initiative?

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Lunapads and our generous customers have donated hundreds of pads to women and girls in developing nations in recent years, and we are now offering more ways than ever to help in our new Donate section.

Pads4Girls seeks to address the problem of girls in developing nations missing school due to a lack of adequate menstrual supplies.  Paying homage to Deanna Duke‘s original Goods4Girls project (sadly now defunct), we decided to keep the name simple as well as make it easy for anyone already aware of Goods4Girls to know that we are up to pretty much exactly the same thing.  Here’s a quickie fact sheet on the drastic difference that missing school can have on girls’ lives.  In comparison to the Always “protecting futures” campaign, Pads4Girls seeks to offer a more sustainable, environmentally responsible solution.

We had the recent pleasure of connecting with Sapna Dayal, Executive Director of Imagine1Day, a Vancouver based NGO (started by the founders of lululemon athletica) whose mission is to provide primary education for children in Ethiopia.  Watch our short video interview with Sapna to learn what Imagine1Day is doing, why this work is so personal to to Sapna and how you can fill her suitcase with Pads4Girls when she returns to Ethiopia in May.

We are so encouraged by the growing public interest in helping girls in Africa. This week alone, we added 2 new organizations and are collecting Pads4Girls for communities in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Ethiopia.  You can learn about each organization in the Donate section of our site, and we will continue to update our list of recipients as we connect with them.  The synergies of our common mission ~ to help keep girls in school and provide a more sustainable solution is incredibly exciting.  But this is just the beginning!  We are currently in the midst of bigger plans which include providing resources and training to allow the women in Africa make the pads themselves and create a source of income for their families.  We’ll tell you more about this in a future blog post as this project develops.

You can also choose to donate Maxi Pads for inclusion in Birth Kits being distributed by Shanti Uganda, a Vancouver based NGO helping women in rural Uganda .  And of course, cash donations can be made to support the purchase of  pads.

To watch more videos about our Pads4Girls campaign, go to our YouTube channel here.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

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Many of you are aware of the sad news that Goods4Girls is no longer in operation.  While there have been some calls for Lunapads, GladRags and others to pick up where G4G’s founder Deanna Duke left off, we have decided to continue the spirit of G4G’s work with our own yet-to-be-named program.

While G4G has been a major recipient of donated pads, we have also been working with many groups with aims similar to G4G’s for some time.  The latest one is the Lugari Community Resource Centre in western Kenya.  Founder Jenipher Wasike is currently in Vancouver fundraising for this wonderful initiative that includes agriculture, tree planting, and a women’s group.  The women currently make crafts which are then sold at local markets.  They also hope to start making and selling their own washable pads (more on that soon)!

Jenipher will be returning to Kenya on February 25th and we are trying to get as many Goods4Girls Kits (new name tba, but thanks in the meantime Crunchy, for our continued use of it!) donated as possible prior to her depature.  Please watch this video of Jenipher and consider purchasing a kit.  For each kit purchased until her departure, Lunapads will donate a matching kit.

PS: To view the high quality version of this video, simply hover over the arrow on the bottom right of the viewer & click HQ.  Visit our YouTube page here to rate or comment on this video. From this page, you will also be able to share our video via facebook, digg, myspace and so on. If you have your own YouTube account, please help us spread the word by adding it to your favorites. Thank you! -Lisa

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I am brimming with joy on the recent updates on several Goods4Girls projects afoot in the world.  The next installment comes from Anna and her project called “Cycle of Hope“.  While planning her trip to Kenya to do some volunteer work with HIV/Aids positive women, Anna heard about Lunapads and Goods4Girls and wanted to make this a part of her project.  Resourceful and determined, Anna contacted Lunapads, Goods4Girls, joined a local women’s group in Conneticut, and raised enough money to send 40 Goods4Girls Kits to Kenya.  Shipping products to Africa is not always easy, as we’ve learned from our experience sending Lunapads to Zimbabwe.  Not expecting a confrontation from Kenyan customs officials at the airport to pick up the Lunapads, Anna found the courage to stand up against them.  Here is her report in an email I received in mid November:

I fought Kenyan customs, and I won. At one point yesterday they were demanding over $300 from me in additional taxes and fees. I stood firm: these are donations for a charity. You can’t tax me. This is so not like me! I continue to discover power in myself I never knew I had… and this morning I brought my box of Lunapads home from the airport without paying a penny. Woo hoo!

You can read more about Anna’s trip on her blog here.  It is a wonderful story to follow.  Anna set off to Kenya to help empower other women and in the process, has come back to the United States a more empowered woman herself.  Home briefly for Christmas, Anna is heading back to Kenya in January to start an NGO to help establish sustainable incomes for the “positive” women of Kitengela.   On her follow up trip, she’ll distribute the Lunapads Goods4Girls kits to a small Kenyan-run NGO working with underprivileged teen girls in Kibera.  We look forward to your update in the new year Anna!

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Back from Africa, Carrie-Jane Williams is now home and has updated her blog with some wonderful pictures from her trip to Uganda.  As posted in the Lunapads blog in June 2008, Carrie-Jane was off to Uganda for a volunteer teaching placement and research.  As a side project, she became inspired to do some fundraising to bring Lunapads Goods4Girls Kits  for school girls.  Pictured here is a local nurse talking to the girls about menstruation.

Here is the rest of Carrie-Jane’s report:“Thanks to your donations, about 50 U-Go Girl Kits were taken to girls in Uganda. They were a huge hit with the high school girls! I also brought some to a clinic at a resource centre in a village called Tekera. Because there weren’t enough kits to distribute to everybody (and there’s a huge demand!) I asked the craftswomen and tailors at the resource centre if they could make the pads themselves. We found some old scraps of material and, sure enough, 15 minutes later, a pad was made. The women will start producing pads for local school girls and women and will hopefully make a little money. Overall, the Luna experience was very empowering! U-go Girls!”

Her story in pictures from her blog are a must see.  I particularly enjoyed the pictures of the making of Lunapads (dubbed “Afripads”) by the locals and seeing the old fashioned sewing machines just like my grandmother’s.

All of us at Lunapads couldn’t be happier to see images of the beginings of a long term sustainable solution for the girls.  Thanks again Carrie-Jane for your amazing work and bringing Lunapads to Uganda.

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Our Goods 4 Girls campaign continues to inspire scores of women to help girls in Africa. The latest inspiration is Anna Hawfield who, upon reading about Loretta’s trip to Kenya (which is a very moving blog post) contacted Lunapads to see how she could help while volunteering for International Volunteer HQ. Anna will be distributing Lunapads Goods 4 Girls Kits through the help of Africa Youth Trust, a local NGO that has overseen similar projects in the past. Anna will be in Nairobi for 6 weeks starting in November. To stay on top of her trip, check out her blog here at Cycle of Hope.

Just before leaving for her trip, Anna joined a women’s networking group called SECT (Southeastern Connecticut Women’s Network) and attended a local meeting of the Mastermind Group. “The core purpose of the Mastermind group is to work co-creatively with women locally and globally to facilitate them with empowerment projects in their own lives and communities. Mastermind recognizes women as an underutilized resource in the world. When these women are supported to realize their potential the quality of life world wide improves.”

In just a few weeks, Anna and generous members of SECT raised over $1,500 to fund the purchase of over 50 Lunapads Goods 4 Girls Kits. Way to go ladies! We’re looking forward to getting an update from Anna when she arrives in Nairobi and updates the blog with her story and pictures.

We are so happy to see how the act of global community service is spreading among the Lunapads community and beyond. Please contact us if you want to participate or share your story.

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Those of you who have been following this blog for a while will remember Loretta Cella’s spa fundraiser that raised over $1,000 towards Goods 4 Girls Kits which she then distributed in Kiberia, a suburb of Nairobi. Loretta has gone on to create a charitable foundation whose goal is to continue the work of empowerment for girls globally.

She is having a fundraiser for the Passion Foundation next week on August 14th at 7pm at Ceili’s pub in downtown Vancouver. I’m planning to be there, and Lunapads is donating some silent auction items. There will be an exclusive musical performance by local up-and-comer Alida, as well as a ton of other great silent auction items and doubtless a troupe of Loretta’s fabulous friends. For tickets ($10 each including a drink – deal of the century!), call Loretta (604) 710-4480. We’ll hope to see you there!

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