Blogging for Awareness, Day 7

All month long, Hopeful Parents is celebrating National Family Caregivers Month and National Blog Posting Month. Celebrating is as easy as 1-2-3:

1. If you blog about your child with special needs, include your post for the day below. More details about Hopeful Parents Blogging for Awareness are here.

2. If you like Hopeful Parents, let everyone know by "liking" us on Facebook! Click on the "Like" button on our sidebar, or visit our Facebook profile. We're trying to get to 5,000 likes by the end of the month...

3. If you luuuuvvvvv Hopeful Parents, become a member! All month long, we're giving you one good reason every day to join. Reason No. 7:

You like the website.

Somebody has to pay for this website and all it's bells and whistles…and since day one, that somebody has been me. Hopeful Parents became a non-profit organization in the spring of this year and we have been granted 501(c)4 tax-exempt status by the federal government. I have been reluctant to ask anyone to help pay for the upkeep and administration of this website until now, until we were completely legit and on the up-and-up. Now that we're an established business recognized across the country, I hope that you'll consider joining.

Dues will help finance the costs of hosting the website, using our blog service provider, using our community forum site, and sending e-mail communication to our members. Each month costs roughly $250 to run the website and member communication. That means we need 10 new members each month just to ensure that our operations keep operating. It would be great if I knew all this were covered for the year, so that dues from additional members could be used to help build more activities and programming. But the "activities and programming" reasons are for another day. Stay tuned.

That's all for today...see you tomorrow! And don't forget to add your link. Let's create some awareness about what it's like to care for a child with special needs!