At the intersection of expressive therapies and feminine hygiene products, you’re likely to find only one person: Cherith Pedersen ’11.
“I kind of go where the ideas are. I’m not really bound by an occupation,” says Pedersen, who has a master’s in Expressive Therapies from Lesley and is now working on her PhD.
The Barbados native has engaged her expressive therapies training to help language learners and neurodivergent youth in Denmark, where she lived for many years. She has also worked with many populations in her home country, in therapeutic theater programs with domestic abuse survivors while also helping young people feel comfortable with their bodies and sexuality.
Now she’s taking on entrepreneurship as she prepares to launch Kayamo Pads, an eco-friendly, reusable menstrual product with an app to make it easier for women to track their cycles. Her proposal secured her a place in the Leaders in Innovation Fellowship Global 2022, part of the Royal Academy of Engineers, a UK-based nonprofit. The fellowship supports and trains a cohort of entrepreneurs, from concept to implementation.
Although this venture seems to have little to do with expressive therapies, for Pedersen, it is intricately entwined. But let’s back up.
Discovering Art Therapy
Pedersen first visited an expressive therapist while living in Denmark.
“I was at a period in my life where I was kind of drifting,” she says. Talk therapy hadn’t helped, but creating art with the expressive therapist unlocked something in Pedersen.
“I took away that piece of artwork. It just kept speaking to me. I said, ‘How is this so powerful? How can I study this?’”
Pedersen found and enrolled in Lesley’s Expressive Therapy master’s program in 2006. A few years later, in 2013, she began to make her own menstruation pads, trying a variety of fabrics and stitches until she found a combination that worked for her.
Although her mother’s generation and those before relied on handmade, reusable pads for their cycles, when Pedersen began sewing her own, it was something of a foreign concept except in certain corners of the internet. And while the idea remains far from mainstream, as more people become conscious of the mountains of waste generated by single-use products, interest in sustainable menstrual products has increased. Washable “period proof” underwear has been advertised on New York City subways (with some controversy) and a search for DIY period pads yields blog posts with tens of thousands of hits and YouTube tutorials reaching half a million views.
Back to Barbados
In 2013, Pedersen wasn’t thinking about how she could capitalize on handmade sanitary pads. That idea didn’t begin to take shape until she returned to Barbados and began working on her doctoral dissertation — a study of how voice and sound impact the experiences of marginalized entrepreneurs in business.
“If you call someone on the phone, how are you being received, how are you using your voice differently in different situations?”
While conducting research, Pedersen came across the Royal Academy’s fellowship, one day before applications were due. She decided to go for it.
“It was just serendipitous that I landed in this whole space,” she says.
Pedersen believes the pandemic brought about more consciousness about menstruation and menstrual justice in Barbados, where she says products can be cost-prohibitive and women’s needs are either not considered at all or are viewed as a liability. With Kayamo, which is reminiscent of her daughter’s name, she wants to educate Bajan women about the environmental toll of disposable pads, employ women to make her product, and help them take more ownership over their own bodies through an app that would make it more manageable to track their personal flow.
“It feels like there is a lot of work that needs to be done,” says Pedersen. She cites a recent incident when she had to advocate for her daughter, who was not allowed to use the bathroom during her period because her science teacher saw it as a disturbance to the classroom. That problem is not uncommon, Pedersen says.
And this is where she most sees the intersection of her expressive therapies training and her business. “Social justice, women’s rights, equity, how we position ourselves as women in the world and liberation, the freedom to not be confined” that’s the bridge, she explains.
