Our Community Outreach
Not everyone in India can afford our commercially priced pads and we aim to ensure that cost is not an obstacle for anyone who would like to use cloth pads. Our community outreach programs provide women and girls with impactful menstrual health education and free or affordable access to cloth pads.
We do this by redistributing profits from our commercial activities to finance our two not-for-profit projects. As a social enterprise, every customer becomes a donor!
Pad for Pad
Menstrual health education and free cloth pad gifting serving adolescent girls from low-income backgrounds.
Pads for Sisters
Menstrual health education and discounted cloth pads serving women from low-income backgrounds.
Serving Women, Girls and anyone who bleeds!
Menstruation is a rich, multi-faceted experience that has social, cultural, economic, environmental, health, and gender dimensions. Eco Femme’s projects have evolved in response to our growing understanding of the holistic nature of this experience along with the evolving development of the menstrual health ecosystem in India and across the world.
We recognise that it is not only women and girls who menstruate; some women do not menstruate and others who do not identify as women may menstruate e.g. trans men. Our dream is a world where cultures normalise menstruation so anyone can bleed with dignity; exploring ways to include other genders, families, and the wider community in conversations is crucial.
For now, our work focuses on girls and women – it is a reflection of the context where we work in India and what we have capacity to focus on meaningfully. For this reason, we have chosen to use the words that women and girls use to refer to themselves rather than the increasingly prevalent term menstruators. We have found that the word menstruators is unfamiliar and can appear abstract, reducing the way that they relate to and define themselves to that of a bodily function – a more limited identity.
We are constantly learning and stretching and exploring how to serve different audiences beyond girls and women… we welcome engagement with anyone who bleeds (or not ????) and look forward to what the future holds with curiosity and openness!
Project stories
Talking to Men and Boys about Sustainable Menstruation
So, why talk with men and boys about menstruation? The answer is simple: because one-sided conversations are not as effective as a two-way dialogue when it comes to change-making! Boys and men are the other part of our population and thus need to be involved in...
The Language of Menstruation
"It is important to examine the language we use, or the language that we have been forbidden to use, and question how it is instrumental in constructing how we think about our body and self....When we don’t talk about menstruation, when we emphasise the...
Unlearning Menstruation: Men in Menstruation
Men in menstruation – are we addressing the elephant in the room? Conversations with men can reveal a lot... “Women never include us in menstruation matters. They talk in whispers and codes all the time” “A woman is impure during menstruation. I will not touch my wife...