Guidelines on Giving

Guidelines on Giving - How we can best help those in need

I love that we have a kick ass, amazing community of generous and caring parents. I love that we’ve had that community for over 18 years.

I hate that sometimes, as a collective whole, we get taken advantage of.

We all want to help each other out, but unless you know that person in person, we strongly urge against this.

To spell it out explicitly, IT IS AGAINST OUR COMMUNITY RULES TO SOLICIT FOR GOODS OR MONEY.

We understand there is a difference between complaining about money (really, we know, we’re all having money problems this year) and outright asking. Please keep in mind that while we made a rule against members asking for money, that goes two ways. DO NOT OFFER TO SEND MONEY TO SOMEONE WHO JUST NEEDED TO VENT.

We can’t police what you do in private. In fact, we don’t want to! That said, our boards are not the place to hit up our many generous members for money. We know a lot of us would send our last $5 to someone who needed to feed a child – we know because we’ve done it! – but this is not the space for that.

It is against our policies/rules/whatever you want to call them to advertise/promote your sales/GFM/whatever anywhere that isn’t the Wednesday mega promo thread. We have been actively deleting self-promo threads and redirecting those members to share on the Wednesday promo thread. It’s there for exactly that reason.

Let’s put it this way: We have ad blockers on our browsers. We skip YouTube ads. We skip TV ads. We don’t want to have a wall full of ads when we have more important things to discuss… like which diaper you like best or which live show is the best intro for the kiddos and which hearing protection is best for baby or crying over that same baby heading off to college.

We don’t like having a lot of rules. If we didn’t have a history of people taking advantage we wouldn’t have these rules. Please respect them.

Here are some additional guidelines and general safety ideas to have concerning giving those those in need.

Non-Holiday Specific

See a member posting about money woes and want to give them a hand? Awesome! Please message them privately about that. Don’t ask on the post itself.

Unfortunately we have to assume we have our own share of less than honest people (as does any site you visit). Please refrain from sending goods or money to anyone trolling for them.

Everyone runs into some trouble sometimes. Please be wary of giving to members who are in trouble more often than not. I know, I want to gather them up and fix it too, but don’t be an enabler. On the flip side, if we see you posting and it is obvious you are angling for donations, we will remove your post and send you a private message. If you preface your post with “feel free to delete if it’s not allowed” we will delete your post and not send you a private message because we’re going to assume you knew it was not allowed.

Holidays, Birthdays, Gift-Giving Occasion Specific

Please do not rush out and buy a stranger’s child a gift because they posted and said their holiday is non-existent or extra-lean this year. We all want to help each other out, but again, unless you know that person in person, we strongly urge against this.

Unfortunately we have to assume we have our own share of less than honest people (as does any site you visit). Please refrain from sending goods or money to anyone trolling for them.

In years past we have had well loved, well known, and long-standing members post about their holiday season woes. I can’t even begin to imagine how much stuff they were sent, gifts for their kids, gift cards for food or gifts, etc.. and at least two of the members I am thinking of are not even on this board any longer, for two very different reasons.

This does not apply to sending a single gift to a mama-friend of yours. I love sending my friends little trinkets or tokens. I am talking about supplementing an entire family’s holiday season.

So where can I share my Go Fund Me/Amazon wishlist/that I need money to pay my bills?

We have a Go Fund Me thread here, which is the only place it is acceptable to post those types of links in our main group. Your local group may have different rules on posting GFM/item requests. We will delete any GFM/GFM type post made to the main group as its own post.