Our guest post last week on Breastfeeding Support Bags at Hospitals was SOOOOO popular and inspired so many moms to get something started in their own areas! It is amazing! So I asked Amanda Mack, the author of the post and founder of the Laramie Breastfeeding Bag Project to write up a list of tips for other moms so that we can start getting the ball rolling in other towns and cities around the country (and perhaps around the world!). Below is a list to help you get started. If you email Amanda directly, she will also send you the contact names of the people with whom she is in contact with for her bags – so that you can save some time on researching all of that information yourself!
Suggestions for starting a breastfeeding support bag project in your area:
By Amanda Mack
1. Contact business and organizations that you know are pro-breastfeeding. I started by looking through the ads in Mothering magazine because these are typically businesses that support breastfeeding and natural family living. I also contacted business that I had purchased products from and loved. I explained what I wanted to do and asked them for any donations they might have- samples, brochures, coupons, handouts, etc. I made a huge list of possible contacts and e-mailed them.
Breastfeeding Support Bags
3. Once you decide the bag has a variety of necessary information and goodies, it is time to assemble a sample bag!
4. Contact your local hospital– see if there is a lactation consultant or coordinator that you could meet with. Explain the project and show the bag. Suggest that the bags are given out when the mom is discharged from the hospital. Our hospital also had to approve the bags before we began giving them out.
5. Find out how many births there are per month at your hospital and assemble bags accordingly. We typically try to fill two months at one time. So here at our local hospital, we have 30-40 births per month, so we try to fill 50-60 or so bags each time. We then have some time in between to contact those companies again to ask for a “refill” on donations. That way when it comes time again to fill them, our supplies are all stocked and ready to go.
If you have any questions
or you need further information,
please feel free to contact Amanda:
Amanda Mack
Laramie Breastfeeding Bag Project
Amanda is one mom who made a difference! You can make a difference too! Please leave a comment telling us if you are planning to do something similar in your local area. And when you do get them started up – please come back after and let us know that too!!
Our, boutique, A Mother’s Boutique is a proud supporter of the Laramie Breastfeeding Bag Project!
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I LOVE this and wish I weren’t too shy to organize something like this locally.
There are free downloadable brochures available at http://www.nocirc.org entitled
“Caring for your Intact Son” that would go well in these bags. It’s been shown that circumcision interferes with breastfeeding.
Slee- You could always team up with a friend and have her do the face-to-face interactions and you could do more of the e-mailing and organizing. Keep in mind that there isn’t a lot of face to face interaction involved. It really involves more contact via e-mail since that seems to be most convienent for business/organizations. Hope this helps! You can do it mama!
Gloria- Thanks for the source! I will certainly look into that site- I agree with you!
I LOVE this! It’s such a great idea! There is so little support in hospitals for breastdfeeding! Thanks for the great post!
I am so excited I could burst, as soon as this was forwarded to me, I began to contact a group of women. I would love to be able to start supplying bags by the end of September to our local hospital. They have about two hundred births a month, very lofty goal for us to meet. We live in Lynchburg Virginia, can’t wait to keep you posted on this. I am sending Amanda an email now to get the list of companies! Thank you so much, blessings…..
Laurie Flower
Congratulations to the Laramie project. We at Cottonwood Kids have also created a breastfeeding support program for hospitals.
Currently we are providing over 300,000 of these bags to hospitals nationwide, and it is picking up steam. If you would like to see the information about the program, please visit our website at http://www.cottonwood-kids.com and look for the “Alternative to Formula Discharge Bags.
It is great news that the tide is finally turning.
Erik Maurer
Cottonwood Kids
[…] Bag Project ________________ This post has been edited from a previous version posted at A Mother’s Boutique. Our thanks to Amanda Mack – for her inspiring project and for allowing us to share it! If […]