CCF Hires a new Menstrual Hygiene Management Assistant Program Manager

Written by Colleen Cahill, Board Member

Meet Igroom Lama, CCF’s new Assistant Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) Program Administrator! She joins Kesang Riinchen in Kathmandu, CCF’s MHM Program Manager, and brings a wealth of experience in MHM and community development.

2024 has been very busy, and earlier this year, it was clear we needed help to keep up with growing interest in our MHM workshops. It was a great stroke of luck when Kesang met Igroom through a mutual colleague. Kesang brought a proposal to the board asking to hire Igroom for a part-time contract position, and it was a unanimous “yes!”

At 35, Igroom has a gentle and articulate presence. She identifies as a feminist and believes a woman’s period is a natural process and a sacred subject. She is drawn to menstrual hygiene work because her beliefs contrast with the common practices throughout Nepal where in Buddhist and Hindu communities women and girls can’t talk about it openly and are considered impure during menstruation. She’s frustrated by this because the practices are based in myth and superstition and serve only to perpetuate Nepal’s male-dominated culture. She is excited to be a part of CCF and wants to see more organizations working in menstrual health to spread education and bring about equality for women.

In her role, Igroom will help monitor and evaluate CCF’s MHM program to identify areas for improvement. She’ll develop and conduct trainings and continue to maintain and cultivate new relationships with partners in Nepal. Her education and experience are an enormous asset to CCF and we are so grateful to have her!

Igroom holds a Bachelor’s in Development Studies and a Masters in International Cooperation and Development studies. Her schooling taught her ways to approach communities, assess needs, and identify what conditions must be developed for improvement from the local level to international. Her interest in menstrual hygiene issues started early in her education as her studies led her to volunteer opportunities in communities where she was forced to follow chhaupadi practices during her period. The treatment she experienced ignited a passion in her and she turned her attention toward menstrual hygiene awareness.

In 2015, while Igroom was still working on her masters, she had an internship with a friend’s NGO that implemented WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) initiatives. Through this experience, Igroom got a broader picture of menstruation and how acutely the subject is suppressed and hidden. When the NGO’s Project Coordinator asked Igroom if she could write her Master’s thesis on menstruation management, she was all in. She chose to focus on concepts of menstruation practices in Buddhist and Hindu communities.

In villages where chhaupadi is practiced, Igroom says it’s like torture when the girls get their periods. She understands their pain having experienced the inhumane treatment while volunteering. During that time, whenever she was on her period, she was considered “impure,” wasn’t allowed to touch the water tap or enter the kitchen, and had to sleep separate from the family while also enduring other degrading treatment.

Igroom has already helped conduct two trainings and proven to be an instrumental addition to CCF. In the year ahead, she plans to support CCF in analyzing and documenting our work, establishing baselines, and providing guidance. She wants to demonstrate to our donors how their support is making an impact. Look for more exciting things to come!

Hot Off the Press! CCF's Menstrual Health Guide

by Colleen Cahill

Talk about a labor of love.

After nearly two and a half years of incubating...er...I mean, development, Conscious Connections Foundation (CCF) is proud to announce our brand new Guide to Menstrual Health for Women & Girls is complete and has already been put to use! This is BIG news for our small and mighty organization.

CCF super-hero-slash-key-partner, Kesang Yudron, led a massive effort to bring menstrual health training to the remote villages in the Upper Arun Valley in Eastern Nepal last month—our first training session since the lockdown began last year (look for this story coming soon). The women and community leaders loved the guide with all its bright and fun illustrations.

Puberty page layout

CCF Steps Up Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) Training Initiative

In the fall of 2018, CCF began conducting menstrual health training. This initiative grew out of our existing Power of 5 program working to educate children—with an emphasis on girls.

Through this effort to educate girls and break down cultural barriers, it was clear that without adding the menstrual health component, we’d be falling short on truly setting them up for success. It aligned well with CCF’s mission and Nepali partners led the way to get this work started.

Kesang Yudron, CCF MHM project manager, set out the goal of the initiative:

“To inform and provide access to information on Menstrual Health and Hygiene across Nepal so women have a choice to live in dignity, equality and justice.”

To date, CCF has held several trainings in Kathmandu as well as several remote areas, and until last month, there have been no specific course materials. The students and trainers asked for a more permanent and comprehensive reference tool to take home and share with others.

In doing some research to see if other organizations had an existing menstrual health manual CCF could purchase to support our training sessions, we discovered the options were proprietary and didn't quite fulfill our need for information that fit all literacy levels.

Kesang proposed to the board that the organization create its own manual and design it based on our specific training focusing on issues around gender inequality, sexual reproduction, myths, taboos and religious beliefs surrounding menstruation and the local laws that support women’s rights. She added that it should be available to anyone who wanted it so that it might be shared widely.

This was no small undertaking, but the board unanimously agreed to fund the project.

Kesang was off and running.

The “Un-Manual”

CCF formed a menstrual hygiene committee to offer support to Kesang as she gathered her team in Nepal and developed content. Together, we determined the primary goal of the manual—to simplify the menstrual health information so that students of all ages with different levels of literacy and education could understand it and get excited to share it back to their families and communities.

We wanted to avoid creating another boring textbook. To keep the students—whether female, male, young or old—engaged and curious, Kesang hired an illustrator to develop colorful, fun and informative illustrations. This talented Nepali woman, Promina Shrestha, brought the guide to life by introducing “The Egg,” our cute, friendly main character who shepherds us through the manual explaining diagrams and offering informative tips and encouragement.

Illustrator’s rough sketch of The Egg describing her journey through menstruation

For a topic in Nepal that can be taboo and shameful, this was an effective tactic to make students feel more at ease.

The team in Nepal was rounded out with help from a nurse, writer, translator, and graphic designer, with a little support from the menstrual hygiene committee stateside.

Illustrator’s rough sketch of The Egg explaining what might happen during menstruation

Comprehensive Menstrual Hygiene Content

This version of the guide is one CCF will continue to evolve going forward. Many issues were discussed and considered, but in the end, we focused in on the following outline for our first edition:

• Puberty

• Anatomy (male and female)

• Menstruation

• Menstrual Restriction, Social Norms and Taboos

• Menstrual Products (Pros and Cons)

• Menstruation and the Environment

• Menopause

• Menstrual Cycle Calendar ( Moon Cycle)

Menstruation page layout

The Introduction invites the student in with a friendly tone and immediately frames menstruation in the positive light it deserves:

Menstruation is an exciting time of change in your body and mind that signals your entry into womanhood, sexual activity, and being able to have babies. Although it’s an exciting time of change and is a completely normal and healthy process, many girls face exclusion and restriction due to the belief that menstrual blood is impure and dirty. Chauppadi, one of the most restrictive menstrual practices of confining women in small sheds, is practiced in Nepal.

This mini manual is designed to explain to families and communities about Menstrual Health and Hygiene. This Menstrual Health Manual, explains the natural and normal changes that are happening in your body. When you are more knowledgeable about your body, you will be empowered and better equipped with the information and confidence necessary to manage your long-term sexual and reproductive health.

Maintaining good menstrual health starts with understanding the changes that occur in our body during puberty.

The manual even comes complete with a menstruation calendar at the back, so the women and girls have a tool to help them learn how to track their periods!

Spreading Menstrual education far and wide

CCF published the guide under the creative commons license. It is our hope that this information is shared out freely and widely throughout Nepal and wherever menstrual health education is needed.

The guide was produced and printed in both English and Nepali. If you’d like to support this work and menstrual hygiene education in Nepal, hit the button below. Just $20 sponsors a student to attend menstrual health training. Your dollars make a huge impact.

A BIG thank you to our donors! Through you, this work has been possible.

What CCF does and how it does it

CCF sponsored Menstrual Leadership Training in Kathmandu

By Kimberly A. Maynard, Ph.D.
– CCF Board Member

I have personally worked with, for, and beside hundreds of international aid organizations in many countries. I have professionally examined the intention and value and, ultimately, the impact of international aid work. What does truly caring about our fellow humans around the world and “doing good” look like in an organization? We are in an era of extreme resource imbalance within a globalized economy. Through the media, we are privy to the lives of others in the far reaches of the world 24/7. It tears our hearts when we witness an earthquake destroy a whole village or a young girl destined to hard labor deep in the hands of poverty. We are the privileged, the few, the top end of the ladder yet what do we do to help? How do we express our humanity effectively?

How Do We Do Good Well?

After a career in the field and decades examining this personally, I have boiled it down simply to exemplifying good ethics. In the end, we are humans who want to favorably touch and be touched by other humans. This entails two things for me organizationally: 1) upholding an excellent partnership relationship with those we work with and 2) making an effort to think long-term and to act short-term in the best interest of the community and country.

Last year while trekking to each of CCF’s projects, I kept this in mind. Sitting in a circle in front of the Baseri Health Clinic along with the clinic’s oversight committee and staff, I asked myself this same question: what does “doing good” look like. The clinic was in need of repair. Children from the school next door had taken to throwing rocks at it, which chipped the siding. Some of the rooms flooded during the monsoons due to poor run off and an inadequate foundation. What actions could CCF take that would support the long-term ability of the community to have and uphold a quality clinic and not simply do a quick fix? That day in the circle, we agreed on a plan. CCF engaged a local contractor who employed Baseri young men to upgrade some structural components of the clinic. The contractor, also a committee member, took responsibility to guarantee the work would be maintained in years to come. After our meeting, the schoolmaster from next door walked over to me and thanked CCF for helping ensure that the community had such a viable health service. He said he would personally ensure that children learned to appreciate the value of the clinic and that they would no longer throw rocks.

CCF Takes A Deeper Look At What It Does

That trip prompted some navel gazing among CCF’s Board members. Clearly, CCF is greatly appreciated among the Nepalis with whom we engage and whose lives we touch. How do we articulate how that works? How can our ethics and methods be made more visible and consistent in our work? How can we ensure our integrity, transparency, and underlying values are inherent in everything we do? CCF has held strong values since its inception, such as trusting and working closely with specific Nepali relationships to guide its grant-making. However, up until now, these had been more intuitive than verbalized.

The Board formed a committee to look deep into this question. We held a series of introspective discussions unpacking what we stood for and how we operate. This invisible substructure developed into clear, discernible philosophies and standards documented in What CCF Does and How and agreed to by the entire Board. It states our underpinning beliefs, what kinds of projects we fund and why, and our guiding principles and is the foundation of all our operations. In it, is a set of seven criteria against which we measure each proposal in deciding what to fund in upholding this platform.

For example, our internal discussions pointed directly to our belief that when women and girls thrive, the world is better off. Yes, there are many deserving issues, and CCF has chosen to center its work on women and girls. For decades, I’ve had a sticker next to my desk that reads, “For every year beyond fourth grade that girls go to school, family size drops 20%, child deaths drop 10%, and wages rise 20%; yet international aid dedicated to education is declining.” Paul Hawken’s Project Drawdown uses big data to list the 100 most important, already existing solutions to reversing global warming. It measures how much CO2 is either not emitted or is captured by each solution. Educating girls is number six, family planning is number seven, and the two combined are number one. CCF’s scholarships and menstrual hygiene training are right in there.

I learned early on that giving money and food to the women resulted in the whole family surviving better. When girls get a leg up, their entire lives are transformed, they have more choices, and they give back to their societies. CCF has seen this transformation with Nepali women and girls since its inception. So, we made explicit that our work is to support women and girls.

The Process Is As Important As The Product

Yet, my experience has underscored it is not just what an international aid organization does does but how it does it. The process itself can often become the majority of the benefit. CCF has always invested in trusted Nepalis to guide our actions. Making this explicit through our guidelines grounds us in these precious relationships. This stems from the fact that every organization has to decide how directive it will be. Will it use its education and experience to proffer activities to a community or will it ask the community—sometimes without much subject matter experience—to decide what to do?

CCF has decided to walk beside and partner with Nepali communities, working collaboratively on issues of interest related to girls and women. In this, Nepalis collectively benefit from CCF’s involvement (not least of which is financing), while we in the West learn from working closely with the unique Nepali cultures and approaches to their circumstances. That said, CCF remains open to the understanding that there will be situations when it walks ahead and directs change. Similarly, there will be situations when our Nepali partners have more insight and should rightfully lead. We see this two-way, accommodating modality deepening and strengthening our relationships.

Around the World Benefits

Another significant component of CCF’s internal workings that emerged during our discussions was the value of our North American partners. We are immensely grateful for the financial generosity that continuously delights and strengthens us. Indeed, without our bighearted donors, we could not do what we do. And yet the relationship goes far beyond the funding.

Despite most of the world now having full time access to information, our understandings of and exposure to other cultures is always limited. CCF plays a unique role in bridging some of this gap personally. Recognizing this, we renewed our commitment to bring glimpses of the rich Nepali life to our donors and to the internet public through our website, newsletters, blogs, fundraising, and personal interactions with other Americans. We see this cross-cultural sharing plays a crucial role in linking communities and individuals across the planet and contributing to a broader sense of our global humanity.

To Hell With Good Intentions

As we all have witnessed, the challenge is not in holding good intentions as we set out to “do good.” The pages of history and the streets of villages around the world are literally littered with examples of disastrous projects of well-intentioned aid organizations. I can personally attest to many “unintended consequences” of poorly designed, ill-thought out, and failed programs.

Unfortunately, the international system rarely holds international organizations accountable for such projects. It is the community, the local population who must live with the debacle. Some of this is the result simply of poor planning and inexperience, exaggerated expectations, funding shortfalls and other such natural naiveté. Much of it, however, can be avoided by knowing the context in detail and thinking longer-term. By imagining both the spinoff benefits and potential problems that might arise from both the project and the process used, one can develop a more informative perspective.

CCF has adopted this long-term thinking in our foundational platform. For each proposal, we ask ourselves whether the project will likely have been a good idea a generation (20 years) hence. Without the benefit of hindsight, we do our best to imagine the enduring positive and negative implications of our actions. In the Baseri example above, in the short-term, the clinic was repaired before the monsoons. By using a local contractor (instead of one from Kathmandu) who then hired community laborers using largely local materials, money went back into the area’s economy, local workers developed some capacity in this form of building repair, and the skills necessary for maintaining the clinic are now resident in the community. A generation from now, these capabilities will hopefully remain.

Living Our Values

During this reflective process, we asked ourselves, “Change is happening all the time; what part of that change do we want to be?” While articulating our values and methodology doesn’t fundamentally change what CCF does or how we do it, it does elevate our work to a higher level. We are now visibly more accountable to ourselves, as we have an agreement against which to measure our actions. We are also more accountable to our Nepali partners, as our transparency is a commitment to right relationship. Lastly, we are more accountable to the public and to our donors who can track how we manifest our principles in our activities. By being explicit about our actions and values and putting our integrity on the line, we hope to attract North Americans intrigued by our work as well as Nepali partners and other opportunities that align with our approach.

Like many others, my years in the field have developed an attentive eye towards international aid. Our responsibility to our fellow humans obliges us to ensure our good intentions equate to positive long-term impact to the best of our ability. Dependency, colonialism, entitlement, and cultural bias are just some of the challenges we face with our generosity and true interest in helping others. It is with that sensitivity that I am engaged in and so appreciate CCF’s concerted self-reflection. While we never know the full impact of our efforts, with our ongoing partnerships with Nepali colleagues, we hope to cultivate a better, more loving world for all—one in which we each bring what we have to the table and engage deeply in each other’s lives such that we truly are contributing to a more beautiful world.

CCF's 2018 Annual Report released!

CCF’s 2018 Annual Report is finished and ready for reading! We’ve had fun putting this together and looking back on how much CCF and our partners in Nepal accomplished in 2018. Please read! We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed facilitating the work. Thank you for all of your support.

Sincerely,

The Board of Conscious Connections Foundation

Denise Attwood, Cameron Conner, Austin Zimmerman, Ric Conner, Martha Newell, Kim Maynard, Colleen Cahill and Saskia Peck

Development of a "mini-manual" on menstruation begins

Menstrual Health Training being conducted in Nepalgunj located in south central Nepal near the Indian border.

The CCF board of Directors recently approved funds for development of an educational supplement to increase understanding and retention of information shared during Menstrual Health leadership trainings.

The goal of the manual is to simplify the menstrual health information so that students from all levels of education and literacy can understand what is being shared and carry that information back to their families and communities. It will serve as a great reference tool for trainees to revisit.

The project will be guided and overseen by CCF’s partner, Kesang Yudron, who serves as our Menstrual Hygiene Management Project Manager.

To date, CCF’s Menstrual Health Program has been growing steadily, having conducted several trainings throughout rural Nepal. It has been exciting to see this program being met with great interest and enthusiasm. The training covers gender inequality, sexual reproduction, myths, taboos and religious beliefs surrounding menstruation and the local laws that support women’s rights.

The manuals should be ready in July. Look for updates coming soon!

CCF Sponsors 3-day Menstrual Hygiene Leadership Training

We are so proud of our partners in Nepal! With your support, CCF was able to sponsor a 3-day intensive Menstrual Hygiene Leadership training for 26 women—and one brave man—from rural and urban areas in Nepal. It was held in Kathmandu, Nepal. Our partner Kesang Yudron did an amazing job organizing this training including lining up the respected team at the Radha Paudel Foundation to do the training. Our partners at the Association for Craft Producers graciously donated their meeting space for the event and it was a huge success! Those trained are now excited to organize their own trainings in their villages and CCF will be there to support them.

This workshop covered issues on gender inequality, reproduction, menstrual hygiene, tools and management, taboos and myths related to menstruation in Nepal, religious beliefs and laws that support women's rights. The focus is to enable participants to increase their understanding of these issues so they can disseminate information to women and men in their local communities.

Already CCF has sponsored 3 shorter trainings that are set up for the girls involved in the Power of 5 and their mothers! Thanks to all in Nepal who did the hard work to get this done and to all who came from remote areas to participate! For those who wanted them CCF also provided a reusable menstrual pad kit for them to use and evaluate. We look forward to making them better and better and available with all the future trainings!

Menstrual Hygiene Education in Nepal is spreading!

Education about women’s menstrual health is spreading! Newly trained Nepali leaders, Yogendra, Pema, with the help of program director, Kesang, are taking this very important information out to rural villages. These trainings cover issues including gender inequality, reproduction, menstrual hygiene, menstruation tools and management, taboos and myths related to menstruation in Nepal, as well as religious beliefs concerning menstruation and laws that support women’s rights. In the fall of 2018, they organized two training sessions and were overwhelmed by the interest. The training in Sertung, Nepal, on October 19 had 151 attendees and 90 reusable menstrual kits donated by CCF were distributed. The second training was held on October 22 in Borang, Nepal and drew more than 40 attendees! Conscious Connections Foundation is so grateful to our partners in Nepal for conducting these trainings! The report back is that everyone is very happy to have these trainings and all of this great information. We look forward to doing further trainings in this remote area in the fall of 2019! Thanks Yogendra, Pema and Kesang. None of this is possible without you!