Last year we held our first ever Strong Start Day, a fundraiser for Postpartum Progress Inc., the nonprofit organization that supports this blog and raises awareness for postpartum depression and all other mental illnesses related to pregnancy and childbirth.

The donations you made on October 5th, 2011, and in the few days after helped pay for the migration of Postpartum Progress to a new and better hosting platform, as well as for better servers to handle the traffic. YOU are the ones who have made sure that PostpartumProgress.com is available to all the moms who need it. In fact, in the last year we’ve had nearly 1 million pageviews and you made every single one of them possible. Not bad for a little niche blog! You also made it possible for me to travel to speak to healthcare providers who want to learn more about the struggles new moms face, including to Boston and New York. I can’t find words good enough to thank you, our partners, for everything you have done. We hope to continue to reach thousands of mothers everyday, and to do more things next year that will offer support and information to struggling mothers.

My goal for Strong Start Day 2012 is to raise enough money to allow Postpartum Progress Inc. to translate what we have done online into offline materials. I am asked all the time by nurses, doulas, physicians’ offices and if they can use the words we have created here to help mothers understand what they’re going through and that they can get better. They want our words because they believe we reach moms in a safe and accessible way. They want and need materials from us, materials that I have yet been able to give them because I haven’t had the funding to create them. Not every new mom is online. Plenty don’t have Twitter accounts. They aren’t on Pinterest. We need more ways to reach moms who need help.

This Friday, October 5th, is the 2nd annual Strong Start Day for Postpartum Progress. We only ask for your help one day a year because we don’t believe in bombarding our friends with continual requests for donations. I know I get zillions of them — in my inbox, my mailbox. We want this one day — October 5th, the day each year on which more babies are born than any other — to be the one day you are reminded to give whatever support you can to Postpartum Progress, and to encourage everyone who loves you and who believes moms should know more about postpartum depression to support us too. I hope you’ll join us.

Everyone who donates $10 or more is listed on our Partners page – either by name or anonymously, whatever your preference. You can also designate your donation in honor of a particular person. If you donated last year and donate again this year, we will be sure to indicate that. Oh, and if you feel like getting started early, you can share the button below. 😉

Postpartum Progress Inc. is a registered 501c3 organization.