Mom It Forward—Past, Present, and Future Events for Giving

How Is Mom It Forward Changing the World One Mom at a Time?

Past Giving Activities

• Virtual Food Drive. Mom It Forward asked for cash donations and had a live auction (through twitter) to raise money for FeedingAmerica.org. The outcome? With less than 2 weeks of planning, with a community only 6 weeks "young," and in one night, we raised $1400 to help provide families with Thanksgiving dinners.
  
  
• "Happiness Headlines" Challenge. Mom It Forward encouraged #GNO Gals to perform random acts of kindness and write blog posts about them during the month of December to spread holiday cheer. You can read the original post here and the amazing submissions starting with this one (they were all posted Christmas week.)
  
  
• Christmas Caroling. Part of our Mom It Forward plans for 2009 are to start a Mom It Forward organization with local chapters. In December, we beta tested the local chapter idea. We got together with several moms—either those we had met during #GNO or those in the Utah blogging scene—and planned a service activity to give back to our local community. Our goal was to plan an activity we could do before Christmas and involve our families. We ended up going Christmas Caroling to an assisted living facility. Visit our Facebook Group (called Mom It Forward) to see pictures from our first meeting and the service project (in the photo gallery).
  

Scheduled Service-Related Events

• The Magic Wand. In December, Mom It Forward won one of the HP Magic Giveaway contests, including $6,000 worth of HP products. You can see our entry post here and our acceptance post here. The contest we won was run by @sugarjones from http://living-intheory.com and we were announced the winners on her blog post entitled "How Many Times Can I Say "Amazing" in Five Minutes?".
  
  We are taking our turn with the Magic wand to spread the HP Magic, starting Tuesday, January 27 when we launch the new Mom It Forward community site. We are sharing the bounty with four women from the #GNO we have identified as in need. We have fun ways planned to get the gifts to them and will be announcing them in video format once a week for four weeks.
  
  
• Mom It Forward Nashville. In February, Mom It Forward's #GNO will be in the house at the Blissdom Conference. After the conference ends, we will have two events: 1) a Tweet Up Saturday night at 8:30 p.m. (more of a mix and mingle) and 2) a service project in true Mom It Forward style Sunday morning from 9-11 a.m. at the Nashville Rescue Mission.

Plans for 09

• Website Launch. We're launching a social networking site so our group has more of an online community to participate in. We will still have our #GNO Tuesday Twitter parties, but #GNO will be one piece of the Mom It Forward movement. All aspects of that movement will share a common goal to strengthen families and communities by first strenthening moms.
  
  
• Team Mom It Forward: We want the Mom It Forward community to be shaped and grow based on community member involvement and feedback. We have a survey up on our homepage (top left in red) that asks for group member's ideas, direction, feedback, and help in shaping our website. We are basing a lot of our website development decisions on community input and can't wait until we have our Team Mom It Forward in place to get even more input and help.
  
  
• Mom It Forward Organization: In February, we will form the national organzation of Mom It Forward and allow community members to join and start their own local chapters.