Community Educating about Menstrual Alternatives
May 9th, 2012 by Guest
I wanted to thank you again for donating Lunapads samples along with some coupons and information for my program on reusable feminine hygiene products. I had the program tonight at 7, and it went over really well. I started by telling the girls my thoughts when I first heard about reusable menstrual products and how disgusting I thought they sounded but that after looking into the products more, I realized they weren’t so nasty after all.
On that note, I asked that the girls keep an open mind going into the program and said that they could judge the crap out of me at the end—after they had the information. That got a chuckle. I followed that by talking about the amount of waste generated by disposable products and then talked about the cost and savings of using green products. I had samples from three different companies, so I told my residents about the different brands and how they differ slightly in their construction and absorption. I know a lot of my residents use tampons and are also extremely active in the outdoors, so I spent the next half of the program telling the girls about menstrual cups and how convenient they can be because you don’t have to worry if you packed enough tampons for your trip and there is no waste to pack out when camping. That’s one thing I love about menstrual cups; it takes the guess work out of how much “supplies” I need to bring on trips!
The group of girls that came was really open to the concept of reusable products and that made the program run very smoothly. They were very interactive, and I discovered that two of the girls already use cloth pads and love them. That was awesome to know because they were willing to share with the group their experience with cloth pads.
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May is DivaCup Month at Lunapads
May 1st, 2012 by Morgan
Art by Jen Vaughn: comic artist extraordinaire
It’s been a bit of a tradition for us to celebrate all things DivaCup in the month of May at Lunapads. Spring is in full swing and the mind tends to wander to daydreams of summer; camping, playing in the woods, swimming at the ol’ swimmin’ hole, outdoor festivals and concerts, vacation time! As many Luna-folks already know, the DivaCup is your BFF when it comes to having your period while experiencing the great outdoors and many other summer activities. For the uninitiated, here’s the scoop on the cup: Read the rest of this entry »
Your $5 to help 10,000 Girls in Malawi
April 27th, 2012 by Madeleine
Pads4Girls has taken many shapes over the years, from making and sending out Kits ourselves, to supporting padmaking workshops to inspiring full-blown businesses. The most recent iteration is called Transformation Textiles, where our role has been as relationship connectors and fundraisers.
If I were to go all the way back on this story, this would be a very long post indeed. Rachel Starkey is one of our all-time Pads4Girls supersheroes. A professional garment manufacturer by trade (I should add that she’s also a nurse, Mother of four and social change visionary into the bargain), she is also a longtime friend and colleague. She credits her original inspiration for making something useful out of waste to a blog post we wrote about Tsunamika dolls in 2007. What could she make out of the waste fabric from her factory, she wondered?
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Making Waste into Opportunity
April 27th, 2012 by Madeleine What if you could take something that was going to be either burnt, landfilled or made into plastic pellets, and make it into something highly useful that could have a major social impact for very little money? Cool, right? We call it Transformation Textiles (TT), it rocks, and this is how it works.
Major sporting goods companies and mass market retailers make bathrobes, tank tops, track pants etc by the millions in factories located primarily in developing nations. You knew that. What you may not know is what that actually looks like. Consumers typically focus on things like worker safety, fair wages and factory conditions in these transactions: fair enough – they are super-important issues. What you may not have thought about, though, is the waste that it generates. Imagine rolling out dough and cutting cookies from it – the pattern pieces for making clothes are the same as the cookie cutters, and the fact that they’re not square means that there will be leftover dough – or fabric in this case. Normally this waste, called “offcuts”, is thrown away.
While most offcuts aren’t big enough to make anything large, there is ample opportunity to place patterns for small things (say for example menstrual pads, or parts of a pair of underwear), or things that could be pieced together, in the master marker – all it takes is willingness on behalf of the manufacturer. Rachel Starkey is a longtime friend, colleague and Pads4Girls supporter who is pioneering this thought-leading movement.
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Meet Anna Ebert, shero
April 27th, 2012 by Madeleine 