In June of 2023, LUÜNA got in touch with our group, proposing an idea that intrigued us all. LUÜNA is a women-led social enterprise based in Hong Kong, with warehouses in Singapore, whose goals and mission align greatly with those of our service. They suggested installing free menstrual product dispensers in all the bathrooms at our school. We had recently switched from paid dispensers to relocating all free menstrual products to the nurse but the concept of free dispensers in the bathrooms drew our attention.
Soon, in October of 2023, we arranged for a meeting with Jayme, the Community and Programme Manager to discuss their ideas, offers, and experiences, and for us to express our concerns and ask questions. We concluded the meeting with a decision to collect statistics and send out surveys about how many people in our community would appreciate this initiative. We sent the data to LUÜNA to allow them to calculate and send us an approximate quota. Meanwhile, our group contacted some other schools working with LUÜNA to receive feedback.
Before committing to LUÜNA, we decided to run a short trial with their products to understand how much we would be used as a community. We also used the trial as a way to clear out some of our doubts and concerns about people taking more than they need because they are free. To fund this trial the student council team very generously offered their leftover funds from the year before. We met with a member of the student council, Tanay Suresh, who informed us that they had enough to fund a 2-week trial. We ran this trial from the 4th to the 15th of December and kept a log of how much was being used in each bathroom, then updated LUÜNA with this information.
Our chairs and Tanay then presented to the Facilities committee to make this initiative permanent in our school. After presenting the idea and the details of the project and finally presenting LUÜNA’s final quota and the results of our trial, the facilities committee recommended that we research and reach out to some other companies and get a range of quotas to compare.
We found two more companies that had similar objectives to LUÜNAs: Dame and If You Need It (IYNI). We reached out to them and explained our projects and ideas. Dame is a company supported by LUÜNA and they are mainly based in the UK. Their products are sustainable and they provide both pads and tampons, however, since they are based in the UK, we concluded that the transportation and shipping would not be as sustainable as LUÜNA’s. IYNI is a company based in France and they mostly work in Europe and North America, and their dispensers are customizable, however, we discovered that their products are not sustainable. Both companies recommended that we find local providers to cut down on shipping costs. We got proposals from Dame and IYNI and presented our new data to the facilities committee in March of 2024.
A few weeks later, facilities had decided which company they were willing to fund for us. They had decided that LUÜNA was the best fit for our school. The system will be implemented at the beginning of the next school year (August 2024). Starting with dispensers in 10 bathrooms at East Campus for 6 months to figure out the final logistics, then expanding the initiative to Dover Campus.
