FutureLearn has a Tampon Club
Mal Pinder, one of our Developers, explains what a Tampon Club is, and how and why we’ve set one up here at FutureLearn.
tampon.club is a website by “a shadowy cabal of menstruating women” that offers lots of advice and support for people who want to set up Tampon Clubs in their own offices. An individual Tampon Club is a bunch of people sharing a supply of sanitary products in a place where they can all get to them. Our Tampon Club is this little box:
People have been suggesting starting one for a while, and last month, we finally set it up. In most workplaces, the Tampon Club box is kept in the bathrooms. However, we’d have trouble doing that at FutureLearn, for two reasons.
Firstly, those of us who use sanitary products represent a range of genders, so it would make sense for there to be a stash in the women’s, men’s, and the accessible, gender-neutral bathrooms – but that’s a lot of boxes and a lot of tampons. And while Tampon Clubs are community efforts, I’m the person with primary responsibility for ours, and as a nonbinary person, I’m not able to maintain boxes in gendered bathrooms.
The second reason is that we’re based in the British Library, which means we share all of our bathrooms with the Great British public. If we tried to keep any boxes in the public bathrooms, chances are high we’d end up becoming the Tampon Fairy for an awful lot of library visitors.
So instead, we decided to keep to box right here in the office! It’s kept near the door, so it’s out of the way but still convenient to grab something on your way to the bathrooms. And it’s an attractive and brightly coloured box, so it looks decorative too.
Tampon Club is a community effort and people have already started adding more to the stash. It’s a little thing we can do to help FutureLearners have an easier time working here. If you’d like to set up a Tampon Club in your workplace, there’s a guide on the Tampon Club website.
Want to know more about the way we do things at FutureLearn? Take a look at more of our “Making FutureLearn” posts.
