Lunapads Blog

As you may be aware, we have declared March to be International Women’s Month here at Lunapads, and as part of that we are focusing on different groups of - (well, that part’s obvious!) Today, it’s time to send up a cheer for the future women out there: girls.

Where to start with the subject of girls? Our view is that girls are nothing less than the world’s greatest hope for healing, progress and peace. At Lunapads, we support them by supporting and spreading the word about a variety of organizations working with and for girls including Scarleteen, the Girl Effect (don’t miss their awesome video!), Camfed, Not For Sale and of course Pads4Girls. We also love progressive girls’ media like Shameless, New Moon and Teen Voices.

At Lunapads, 100% of the proceeds of the sale of Teen Booklets goes towards Pads4Girls. We also distribute free copies to organizations that are working with girls and teens.

What especially warms our hearts is when we get emails, phone calls and ‘live-chats’ from girls (or moms of girls and teens) asking great questions and telling us their stories. The day before yesterday we were visited by a Mom and her daughter who was on the second day of her first period - we felt really lucky to share some time with them, on International Women’s Day, no less!

Here’s a wonderful example of a girl’s self-expression about her first period - a bittersweet poem written by Lacy Hale. Lacy says: “The following is a poem that I wrote a couple years ago when I decided to make my change from commercial menstrual products to healthier, greener alternatives. When I was a teenager, I definitely thought of my period as a curse and dreaded it each month. Now that I’m older, I find that I actually enjoy my period, taking the time to reflect on my art, my life, and what it means to me to be a woman. “

My River

The summer that I started
Was desert-like and dry
Yet I awoke that morning shrouded in wet red rivers
Of which I had yet to learn the ebb
And flow.

Yelling for my mother,
It was no surprise to her
Because of the complaints
Concerning the belly
Of the 13 year old girl
The night before.

I suppose in some sort of celebration
She made a breakfast that morning
Of the likes I had rarely seen.

But my stomach was full
Of other things and pains
So new I barely touched
My biscuits
And gravy.

My father came home that evening
And without words or glance
Tossed my necessities on the counter.
A look of fear and anger in his eyes.

Or maybe I just misread it
Out of my own embarrassment.

This week we are giving away 3 Teen Kits: leave a comment here telling us about your favorite girl or teen (this includes you, if you happen to be one of these fabulous beings!) to be eligible for the giveaway. Be sure to include your age, location, relationship (ie sister, friend, daughter, Mom) and what you love about this person. Have fun and good luck! We’ll be announcing the winners in our April newsletter.

Just when you thought “hey, today is International Women’s Day!” we have decided just for fun to declare it to be International Women’s Month! This is Lunapads after all, and a month just seems more appropriate - a little more womanly, if you will. Plus, with so much to talk about and celebrate, why rush it?

The timing this year is truly extraordinary, with the recent Olympics here in Vancouver having shone a light on women’s superb athleticism, not to mention Kathryn Bigelow’s ceiling-busting Oscar wins just last night. As great as all of this is, though, it’s important to remember that comparable success is not necessarily being shared by our sisters in developing nations, and that we still need to keep working for change even as we celebrate, a theme I will be developing in upcoming posts this month.

Longtime Lunapads customers will be anticipating our annual International Women’s Day sale to take place right about now, but for various reasons this year it’s going to look a little different (and last longer!)

My advice to you right now is if you are not already a Lunapads.com Facebook fan or following us on Twitter, in order to be in the loop for the series of contests, giveaways and specials that we are brewing up, now would be the time to sign up or follow us. In case you are not on our e-newsletter list, I highly recommend signing up there as well to learn about other news that will happen before the month is out!

To start off, for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week (March 8-10) we will be donating 10% of sales to Pads4Girls, as well as MATCHING all Pads4Girls Kit and Birth Kit Maxi donations. Here’s a great opportunity to help girls in developing nations get the education they deserve and/or improve maternal health. You can learn about our current recipient groups here:

Sexual Rights Centre (Zimbabwe)
Lugari Community Resource Centre (Kenya)
Kibaale Community School (Uganda)
Imagine1Day (Ethiopia)
Pads for Prisons Project (Sudan)
Rafiki Africa (Kenya)
The Passion Foundation (Kenya)
Shanti Uganda (Uganda)
Afri-Pads (Uganda)

Please donate generously, and don’t forget to pick up something nice for yourself as well!

Have a great day, ladies, thanks for your support as always, and stay tuned!

Love from the Lunagals:
Madeleine, Suzanne, Lisa, Morgan, Sara, Goni and Sandra

Before we ring in some news about what’s new for 2010, we wanted to reflect upon 2009, and how it brought Lunapads some great new people, products and inspiration.  Here are a some of the highlights:

Pads4Girls expands:  During 2009, we expanded our Pads4Girls program by eagerly partnering with new groups that reached out to communities in Cuba, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia.  Thanks to customer support and the work of courageous individuals and NGOs, hundreds of girls and women are now able to stay at work or school while menstruating, and deal with their periods safely and with minimal environmental impact.

Recognizing there are practical solutions closer to home, we created our  “Make your own cloth menstrual pads” video series that has been viewed by thousands. These videos are regularly used by women in Africa (and here in North America) to make their own cloth pads. And in December 2009, Lunapads partnered with Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) by donating 20% of holiday sales for 2 of our top-selling gift items to their program, which makes biodegradable disposable pads from agricultural waste in Rwanda.

Fabulous folks and adventures abroad: One of the perks of our work is choosing to take some strategic business trips and while doing so, connecting with some truly amazing people.  During 2009, we had the good fortune to meet some real treasures and leaders in our community: In March 2009, we attended the always mindboggling Expo West Natural Products Trade Show in Anaheim CA and reconnected with our friends Francine and Carinne Chamers, founders of the DivaCup and also met Sarah Kraft, founder of the online Mindful Mama community.

While walking the trade show, we spotted Mothering Magazine Founder, Editor and Publisher Peggy O’Mara and couldn’t miss the opportunity to stop and tell her how much we adored her.  This conversation led to the plans for a personal visit from Peggy right here at Lunapads the following month.  Leveraging off of Peggy’s rock star status as a natural parenting pioneer and leader, we brought together a group of friends and colleagues to hear Peggy speak at a warm and inspiring tea party benefiting Pads4Girls.

In September 2009, I took a first-time trip to the ABC kids expo in Las Vegas, where I also had an insightful visit to Zappos.com’s headquarters.  Meanwhile Suzanne had yet another transcendent experience at the Social Venture Institute (SVI) at Hollyhock, BC.  In November 2009, we both attended the Green America Business Conference and Green Festival in San Francisco.  While we were there, we had the great fortune to meet up with  SHE founder Elizabeth Scharpf and one of our business heroes, Reusablebags.com founder Vincent Cobb.

New products and fabrics: We expanded the Lunapads collection with several new products and fabrics: the P-style, Wysi-wipes, Cloth Wipes (which elicited one of our most discussed blog posts of the year) and our first-ever custom 100% organic cotton print, Magenta Mandala.

Lunapanties, our very own period underwear, made a long awaited comeback in November 2009, with the introduction of our new Hipster style and magenta colored organic cotton.

Staff changes: We bid a tearful and fond farewell to Sandra, one of our longest-term employees, as she moved on to continue her work as a bicycle safety educator. While it is hard to replicate Sandra’s incredible personal flair for customer service, Sara, the newest addition to the Lunapads team, is doing a fantastic job!

Media and accolades: In the summer of 2009, we learned that Lunapads and the DivaCup were featured in an entertaining and informative book by Canadian journalist Vanessa Farquharson called “Sleeping Naked is Green“.  At the end of 2009 Lunapads was profiled in our of our local papers, featuring a funny photo of Suzanne and I having a “tug-of-war” with a clothesline of Lunapads and Lunapanties.

By far the biggest highlight of the year was being voted into the top 10 of Green America’s People Choice Awards and so you can imagine our reaction when we found out that we had placed in the top 3 and received the newly-minted Shining Light award.

While Suzanne and I celebrated our award San Francisco, we never lost sight of the unsung heroes in the exercise: staffers Lisa and Morgan (whose idea it was in the first place), Facebook and Twitter (follow us! @Lunapads, @Luna_Diva (me) and @Luna_gal (Suzanne)) for providing the forums to drum up votes, and last but far from least, YOU, our awesome customers, for taking the time to cast your votes - it couldn’t have happened with you.

On that note, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all for a great 2009, and wish you all the best for 2010 from the Lunagals!

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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We are delighted to announce our deepened partnership with two amazing organizations (Shanti Uganda, Imagine1Day) who are doing groundbreaking work for girls and birthing women in Africa, and have an exciting update about another organization (Afripads) inspired by Lunapads.

Shanti Uganda
Last month, Madeleine represented Lunapads at the Shanti Uganda art auction fundraising dinner event which raised over $15,000 in support of the construction of a birth clinic, as well as supplies for birthing women.  The image below is of Ugandan Midwives with donated Lunapads that will be included in the birth kits.

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My husband and I sent the kids away to summer camp and planned a vacation to Cuba for just the two of us. We did some research before booking our trip, and learned that Cuba is in dire need of very basic supplies. Individuals I worked with, who had recently visited Cuba, urged me to bring local Cuban women feminine hygiene products, and anything else I could possibly smuggle in. And I don’t use the word smuggle lightly! Cuban authorities do not take kindly to outsiders bringing anything into the country. Fines and being heavily taxed is a very real risk, especially when bringing in new merchandise that looks like it could be resold.

With so many people urging us to bring supplies, we really felt a responsibility to help in any way we could. It was important to us that we brought items that would last and not cause more damage to their waste systems. We collected a good variety of items; backpacks of school supplies donated by my daughter, as well as supplies from the local elementary school. I placed an ad on Craigslist asking for cloth diapers and received several new and gently used diapers.  We later learned that many locals will use a disposable diaper 2-4 times, depending how many times they could wash them out, and were glad to have these donated diapers on hand. Finally, we brought a variety of Lunapads to give to local women.

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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.

Hello Everyone - Emily Wilson here!

Some updates for all of you who are interested in the Lunapads distribution in Zimbabwe.

First of all, thanks to so many of you generous people, I was able to deliver 42 Pads4Girls Kits at the beginning of May, which is equivalent to $1260! This was quite an overwhelming number of contributions, and I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all who contributed. And, thanks to Lunapads, the donation drive is going to continue as long as I am traveling to and from Zimbabwe, so if you would like to contribute more, or pass on the donation information to others who may be interested, please do so. I will be making another trip to Zimbabwe in September, so I hope to have some more pads to take with me then

Second, we have a new delivery partner! Apart from the Sexual Rights Centre—which is overseeing delivery of pads in and around Bulawayo to The Haven (who received the first batch of donations in January), Contact Family Counselling and Ingutsheni Psychiatric Hospital—the Rural Libraries & Resources Development Program is now delivering pads to women in rural areas of Matabeleland.

The Rural Libraries & Resources Development Program (RLRDP) is a community-based, non-governmental organization that was established in 1990, with the aim of establishing and developing community libraries and information services to empower the rural population. They provide remote, rural communities with free, relevant and appropriate information and cater to a diverse group of users that includes preschool children, school children, youth, women and men. They have assisted 300 rural school community libraries and use donkey drawn mobile carts and book delivery bicycles to do outreach to areas where there are not proper roads.

RLRDP heard about the maxi pad donations through the Sexual Rights Centre, and asked to be involved in the project, to ensure that women and girls in rural areas also have access to sanitary wear. In May 2009, they made their first delivery of pads and tampons (by donkey cart!) to an HIV/AIDS club in Bubi District, about 70 km from Bulawayo. One of their staff members, who is helping with the delivery, sent the photo below.

* women in Bubi District, Zimbabwe, receive sanitary wear donations through the Rural Libraries & Resource Development Program

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            We are always on the lookout for organizations to donate cloth pads to, though our Pads4Girls campaign. The need for a sustainable solution to womens’ menstrual needs in developing countries is great and there are many wonderful organizations addressing this issue. Our newest recipient group is the Pads for Prisons project. The project exists to address the needs of women in the prisons of war-torn southern Sudan.
After two decades of civil war, the prison system in Southern Sudan has all but been destroyed and is in desperate need of reform. In the mean time the government of has identified a specific need to respond more effectively to the circumstances of children, women and other groups in prison with special needs. An assessment of the situation found that one of the issues that women in the prisons are facing is a total lack of health care and sanitary facilities, including sanitary pads.
Currently prisons are used to house numerous individuals who are not offenders, such as the mentally ill who are detained simply because the specialized facilities required to assist them simply do not exist. Aside from the many mentally ill women, many of the women detained in the prisons are not criminals by North American standards, rather they are in prison because of adultery (considered a criminal offense only for the woman involved) or they are serving time for their husbands who have unpaid debt.
Menstruation is a big challenge for the women in the prisons as they do not have adequate supplies. At best they are forced to use an old rag to deal with their period and at worst; nothing at all.  According to Pads for Prisons’ website one prisoner noted that she was tied to a tree during the time of her menstrual cycle, as the guard did not want her to make a mess on the prison floor.
Pads for Prisons has already collected 610 cloth pads to send to the women and are seeking further donations to help supply all of the women at the prisons with a supply of reusable cloth pads. To donate a Pads4Girls Lunapads Kit to the Pads for Prisons project or any of our other recipient groups visit the donate pads section on Lunapads.com.

In Lunapads mythology, Once Upon A Time there was a fair young maiden (yours truly!) who aspired to make the loveliest washable menstrual pads in the land.  She toiled endlessly at her sewing machines day after day, week after week, and (natch) month after month, until she created something she was satisfied with.  She asked her mirror, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which are the fairest pads of all?”, to which the mirror replied “All pads that are made with love and respect for women’s bodies are truly fair and lovely.”  Love that mirror!  I passed along the task of sewing Lunapads to our noble production partners many years ago, but I continued to sew all manner of clothes and household linens right up until my daughter was born just over 4 years ago.

Since that time, I must confess that gardening has captured my creative heart (easier to do with a 4 year old, as well!), and so I was a bit nervous to pull out my rulers, scissors and 20 year old domestic single-needle machine to make this video - did I still have the magic?  That verdict will have to be in the eyes of the beholder of the video, but for my part it was really fun in a “blast from the past” kind of way.

Part 1:

Part 2:

The videos and pattern download were created in response to two needs: first, as a possible option for those who can’t afford Lunapads, or to support those who prefer to make things themselves, just because. Second is to offer it as an instructional tool for women in Africa to make pads for themselves and/or as commercial products, as well as for crafters in this neck of the woods who want to make pads to contribute as donations to Pads4Girls (more on that in the next post - stay tuned!)

A note on the video: it is not about how to make Lunapads, which requires a far more complex sewing process (not to mention 3 different fabrics and 2 different sewing machines - eek!)  Rather, it is an easy, adjustable pattern that can be made with a single-needle domestic machine and a wide variety of fabrics.  You can download the pattern here.  I encourage you to experiment with different fabrics and closures, and have fun!