Staff Training

Our Aim: To work with civil society to provide access to facilities, appropriate products and on-going support for vulnerable people on their period.

Do you work face-to-face with vulnerable people who menstruate? 

Do you want to understand more about what it's like to get your period whilst living in poverty?

Does your organisation want to support its service users to feel more comfortable?

Since November 2017, we have run a series of staff training events across the South West, including in Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth. In these half-day training events, designed for any staff or volunteers working directly with vulnerable people, we discussed period poverty in the UK and ran interactive, engaging activities helping participants to understand period poverty in relation to their organisations and the people they worked with. The aim of the training has been to deconstruct taboos, share stories, learn from each other and to network.  

As part of this goal, we have also offered in-house training, designed to be bespoke to the organisations we’ve worked with. These in-house staff training sessions have been designed to support organisations to become fully period friendly and to equip them with the tools to open up a dialogue about periods and period-related issues. Over the last year, we have offered both half-day and full-day events, which have been as formal or informal as organisations need and which have catered directly to staff and volunteers’ needs. 

Why staff training?

Did you know that over half of the women we interviewed told us that they simply cannot afford sanitary products? Participants in our interviews and surveys also told us that they’ve had to rely on food banks, church handouts, tissue paper and cut up nappies, among other materials, to manage their menstruation. 

And yet we’ve often heard from organisations that periods don’t impact their organisation and that they’re too much of a low priority issue for them. With our staff training we aimed to address this gap, which we see as exacerbating the symptoms of period poverty and which we believe is ultimately caused by the culture of secrecy and shame surrounding periods.

We believe that...

● Periods are normal and that anyone should have a right to speak about them to anyone at any time

● Organisations that work with vulnerable people have an important role to play in creating a period friendly environment for those who access their services

The goal of our staff training, therefore, has been to help staff and volunteers implement positive culture changes within their organisations.

What have participants got out of the staff training? 

● Participants reported leaving with an improved understanding of how periods are relevant to their organisation. 

● Participants felt more able to relate issues around period poverty to their work and to their service users.  

● Participants reported leaving with knowledge of the further action they could take to improve their organisation’s approach to menstruation 

● Participants felt inspired and enthusiastic to create positive change within their organisations.