We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Melissa Berton. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Melissa below.
Melissa, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
I have taught high school English at Oakwood School in North Hollywood for over fifteen years, and as you can imagine might be true of any teacher of literature, my idea of “risk” ran somewhere between spilling a hot cup of tea, neglecting the prologue of The Scarlet Letter, and favoring the Oxford comma.
Well. A decade ago, that notion of risk was about to change. My students, incensed by the patriarchal worlds they found not just in the literature we read-–but in their everyday lives–-inspired me to travel with them to the United Nations to serve as delegates to the 57th Annual Commission on the Status of Women in New York City. It was at the UN that we learned about the plight of girls around the world, especially in low-income countries, who drop out of school with the onset of puberty due to a lack of access to affordable and hygienic menstrual supplies. At that same time, we learned that an Indian man named Muruganantham had invented a sanitary pad-making machine that would not only produce low-cost pads, but would spur a micro-economy for the women operating the machine. Gobsmacked by our own privilege in never having to even consider this human rights issue, my students and I determined that we would somehow raise the funds to provide a machine for our sister school in India’s rural village of Kathikera.
At the same time, we decided that in order to raise awareness about period poverty–a term that would not be in the zeitgeist until years later–we would document the process on film. This meant we had to hire a talented director, along with a whole team of filmmaking experts. A tall order, to be sure. And, of course, we had no idea how to produce a documentary, much less one that would be shot across the globe, and that the cost of acquiring the pad-making machine plus a year’s worth of raw material, along with the costs of film-making—even on the thinnest shoestring of budgets—would come to a whopping $75,000. How could we ever raise that kind of money? I mean our bake sales had been successful, but this was a whole new ball game. ..
We took a strategic risk. Many readers may be familiar with the various fundraising platforms out there such as Indie GoGo, Go Fund Me, and Kickstarter. Although Kickstarter was arguably the best site to raise funding for a documentary, there was a catch: on Kickstarter, if you don’t make the full amount of funds you ask for within 30 days, you forfeit any money that you do make. We decided we would go for it, devoted all of our resources to making the most effective 2-minute video we could muster, and set our bar at $39,000. I am proud (and still somewhat astonished) to say that within two days we reached half our goal, and by the 30 day deadline we had become one of Kickstarter’s “Projects We Love” and made over $45,000—enough to send the pad machine and raw material to Kathikera, and our director to India to film the machine’s arrival in the village. Thanks to our commitment to that risk, we were able to hire young Iranian American director Rayka Zehtabchi (who had just graduated from USC film school), partner with Guneet Monga of Sikhya Entertainment, and produce PERIOD. END OF SENTENCE., which would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short in 2019 and launch The Pad Project as a global nonprofit whose vision is to end menstrual stigma. Period.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
A lifelong advocate for girls and women, Melissa teaches English at Oakwood Secondary School in Los Angeles. As an English teacher, she loves sharing the stories of courageous characters from hundreds, even thousands of years ago, with the students of today. She was eager to say, “YES!” when asked to serve as faculty sponsor for Oakwood’s Girls Learn International, a program of The Feminist Majority Foundation that advocates for equal access to education for all genders. In 2013, Melissa took her students to New York City to serve as delegates to the Annual Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations.
The trip proved to be life changing for all. It was there Melissa, and her students, first heard the term “period poverty.” They learned that millions of girls around the world drop out of school with the onset of puberty due to a lack of access to affordable, hygienic menstrual products. For Melissa’s students, it felt personal. They were discovering that girls their own age were being denied an education because of their periods. Fascinated to learn about Arunachalam Muruganantham, from South India, who invented a machine that manufactures sanitary pads out of natural, locally sourced materials, at a low cost – just 5 cents –they were compelled to “do something.”
Melissa and her students returned to Los Angeles inspired and determined to shine a spotlight on period poverty. They decided to raise money to fund the placement of a pad machine in a partner community, India’s rural village of Kathikera. To educate the public and raise awareness about period poverty, Melissa encouraged their communities to work together to make a documentary.
As Executive Producer, Melissa with her students, director Rayka Zehtabchi, and The Pad Project team, produced the Academy Award-winning Documentary Short, Period. End of Sentence. With the Oscar win, Melissa and her Pad Project team earned international recognition and launched a movement that goes beyond the screen. The success of the film, and the media attention surrounding it, sparked a global conversation about period poverty and menstrual equity and launched the 501(c)3, The Pad Project, into action.
Since 2019, Melissa has served as Executive Director and founder of The Pad Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to the idea that “a period should end a sentence, not a girl’s education.” Today, The Pad Project creates and cultivates local and global partnerships to end period stigma and to empower women and all menstruators worldwide. Often asked why she is so passionate about the issue of menstrual equity, Melissa’s answer is that every day, she has the privilege of witnessing the simultaneous beauty of her students’ physical growth into womanhood along with their intellectual growth that helps them discover the kind of women they will become. She believes it is at this tender and transitional moment that education must be nurtured and never, ever stopped.
In 2020, Melissa was honored by Forbes Magazine’s “50 Over 50 Women Leading the Way in Impact” project, in partnership with Mika Brezinzki’s Know Your Value initiative. She was also the recipient of the 14th Annual Feminist Majority Foundation’s Eleanor Roosevelt Global Women’s Rights Award. Melissa has made guest appearances on numerous national and local news programs and talk shows such as ABC’s The View, Good Morning America, Fox 11’s Good Day LA, Spectrum News 1, and WLNY. She’s been a guest on countless radio programs and podcasts nationwide, including NPR, and has been featured in a broad range of print and online media outlets such as CNN, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Forbes, HuffPost, Newsweek, The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Refinery 29, USA Today, and Yahoo!Lifestyle.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
My students and I founded The Pad Project with the belief that is best summed up in our organization’s tag-line: “A period should end a sentence, not a girl’s education.” Around the world, including right here in the United States, an estimated one in four students misses school because of a lack of access to a safe and affordable means to manage her period. The Pad Project’s mission is to create and cultivate local and global relationships to end menstrual stigma and to empower girls, women, and all people with periods worldwide. Thanks to the universal call to action of our Oscar-winning film, PERIOD. END OF SENTENCE., that launched our nonprofit in 2018, The Pad Project has now expanded to support the production and distribution of pads, tampons, cups and period underwear in 25 US states and 15 countries around the world. To date, The Pad Project has provided over 1,000,000 products to those who need them, and by 2030 our goal is to provide 5,000,000 menstrual products to those who need them. Our vision is to end menstrual stigma. Period.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Like any high school English teacher worth her salt, I am all about a good “Lesson Plan.” I never want to walk into class unprepared to teach a poem or passage of literature. In my early years, especially, I felt it was my responsibility to be the irrefutable expert in my subject matter, ready to answer whatever question came my way. All too quickly the limits of my scholarship became evident. No matter how diligently I studied, the students’ inquiries would always come from new and surprising directions. Gradually, I recognized the paradox: the less absolute I was in my expression, the more my students seemed to learn. My lack of surety opened up an invitation for discussion, and my students–because they had a personal stake in the conversation–gained a deeper and longer lasting understanding. Nonetheless–if I had once been insecure about my proficiency as an English teacher, that uncertainty didn’t even rank compared to my utter lack of knowledge about filmmaking and founding a nonprofit! Here again, I learned the power of vulnerability–of asking questions, and trusting others. Doubt is not a deficit, but a doorway to discovery. 
Contact Info:
- Website: www.melissaberton.com
- Instagram: @melissa.berton
- Facebook: facebook.com/melissa.berton.1
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-berton
- Twitter: @BertonMelissa
- Other: www.thepadproject.org
Image Credits
Katie Jones should be credited for the solo headshot in the white tank and navy blazer