Petaluma group helps women thousands of miles away

‘It just feels good to give back:’ Group makes feminine products for women in the developing world.|

Contact Petaluma Days For Girls

Email petalumaca@daysforgirls.org, or visit

Facebook.com/PetalumaDaysForGirls. DFG accepts fabric donations, but items must be 100 percent cotton and a dark color or flannel. Prints can’t be camouflage or have images on them. Panties must be briefs in girls’ sizes 8, 10, 12 or 14.

Amanda Cummings felt the call to action after Donald Trump was elected president.

Like countless others, she was horrified by the allegations of sexual misconduct and the infamous Access Hollywood tape that were disregarded by some voters in November 2016. That moment energized feminists around the globe, leading to Women’s Marches in 2017 and 2018, and the subsequent #MeToo movement, which has dragged sexual misconduct out from under the rug.

“It just was so frightening when he got elected,” Cummings said.

As she searched for her own lane of resistance, she discovered Days for Girls, an international nonprofit that aims to eliminate stigmas around menstruation and provide reusable sanitary pads for women in underprivileged communities.

In many countries, menstruation is viewed as taboo. In India and Ethopia, studies showed high rates of school absences and dropouts due to a lack of access to sanitary pads. In Nepal, girls are forced to live in small, isolated huts in the freezing cold. Some are raped by intruders and dozens have died in recent years for various reasons, according to a New York Times article published in January.

After doing some research of her own, Cummings was sold, and quickly created a Petaluma team – one of only two in the North Bay and the only one in Sonoma County.

Days for Girls

Days for Girls is a group of Petaluma women helping women in the developing world.

Posted by Petaluma Argus-Courier/ Petaluma360 on Friday, June 22, 2018

Since early 2017, she’s been holding sewing workdays at Petaluma Regional Library to create Days for Girls kits. She estimated she’s sent “about 80 to 100” of the patented packages to distributors visiting various countries in need.

“It was bad enough when I had to buy my first tampons and a cute boy’s mother was behind the counter,” she said to a group of newcomers at a recent workday. “I was horrified, let alone anything worse than that. I just can’t imagine. It’s an important thing we’re doing – remember that.”

The DFG kit went through 27 iterations before landing on the current model. It includes an instruction card, two waterproof shields with pockets to hold as many of the eight absorbent liners as needed, two pairs of underwear, a washcloth, a bar of soap, two Ziploc bags for washing and storage, and a drawstring bag to house it all.

Everything is custom-made, adhering to strict specifications designed for comfort and discreetness. The fabric has to be cotton, and the liners have to be flannel. Panties cannot be white in order to help protect women from being targeted.

And not only do the materials have to meet a certain standard, but the sewing requires a high level of skill, too. Thankfully, Cummings is a member of the Petaluma Quilt Guild, which has approximately 100 members she can lean on.

“I knew women that’d be willing to pitch in and had fabric,” she said. “We exist because of donations.”

On June 12, more than a dozen women set up a workspace in a large auxiliary room at the library, conversing, laughing and sewing with laser-focus precision in a makeshift assembly line.

There were sewers, pressers and some casing all the items into a finished kit. Over the course of four hours, the group put together 25 kits as well as “many components in various stages of completion,” according a post on the team’s Facebook page, @PetalumaDaysForGirls.

“It just feels good to give back,” said team member Jane Myers.

According to the DFG website, the nonprofit has reached 120 countries with 50,000 volunteers spread throughout 1,000 teams in six continents. A 2016 annual report said DFG products had reached over 640,000 women and girls in its first nine years.

The Petaluma team is still relatively new, though. Cummings has been holding the workdays whenever she has time, which is far less frequent than she would like. She said she could use a partner to help lead the team, organize regular workdays and assign specialized tasks for members to do on their own time.

“I’m just starting, and my friends are like, ‘You’ve got ask for more help,’” Cummings said.

Still, every workday yields tangible results, and each kit represents a little more power for women around the world.

“These (kits) are built to last for three years,” Cummings said. “People … will return to a village and they’ll put up pictures of the bag they distributed three years ago, like, ‘See, it’s working.’”

(Contact News Editor Yousef Baig at yousef.baig@arguscourier.com or 776-8461, and on Twitter @YousefBaig.)

Contact Petaluma Days For Girls

Email petalumaca@daysforgirls.org, or visit

Facebook.com/PetalumaDaysForGirls. DFG accepts fabric donations, but items must be 100 percent cotton and a dark color or flannel. Prints can’t be camouflage or have images on them. Panties must be briefs in girls’ sizes 8, 10, 12 or 14.

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