Listing Childcare Options at MCC

Helping parents find childcare and providers find clients while supporting Mama's Comfort Camp.

A fundraising campaign for Mama's Comfort Camp - a project of CTA

The Ithaca Chapter of Mama's Comfort Camp is a vibrant online support community providing emotional and practical support to thousands of mothers in our area.

This fundraising page is a new program for creating win-win-win opportunities that support parents and childcare providers while raising operational funding for the organization (a nonprofit project of the Center for Transformative Action). Here you can purchase the right to advertise your services as an individual childcare provider, or promote a group childcare program you are involved in. We are offering two childcare threads:

-- An Individual Childcare thread: for babysitters, nannies (part/full time), mother’s helpers, etc.
-- A Childcare program thread: for childcare centers of all sizes, after school programs, camps, etc.  

Your listing includes:
1. A comment listing on the childcare thread of your choice: it can include an image, text, and links to other websites and Facebook business pages.
2.  Conversation posts: are separate from the specialty thread, and can be used for research and development conversations, recruitment, or to highlight specific events or promotions. If you opt for a $10 monthly contribution, you get 1 conversation post per three months period. With a $20 monthly contribution and above you get a conversation post every month.
3. Recruitment Thread listings: searching for employees or partners? List them on our job offers thread. With $10 a month contribution you get 1 recruitment listing every three months. With a $20 and up contribution you get them every month.


Listing costs:

Babysitter/Nanny: $10 a month / $90 a year

In-home day care program (up to 10 kids): $ 20 a month /$180 a year

After school / Camp programs: $25 a month/$225 a year

Childcare Centers with 11 kids and up: $30 a month or $270 a year.   

Minimum engagement period is 3 months. Choose to engage for a whole year and you’ll get 12 months for the price of 9 (a 25% discount). Contributions of $180 and above include a mention in the "Mother Upper Circle":  a gratitude list we will feature in the group and our public page and website. When listing your services at MCC you are making a contribution to the Center for Transformative Action, our nonprofit home, but please check with your accountant if this should be reported as a tax deductible donation. It is more likely that the correct reporting should be as a tax deductible marketing expense.

About Trade and Barter: We want to make this opportunity accessible to as many mothers as possible, so we are very open to trade and barter. Scroll all the way down for more info on that.

Important disclaimer: Both threads (like everything at MCC) will be lovingly monitored by our moderators, but we will not be endorsing any provider or checking their accreditation. All quality assurances will be parents’ responsibility. We reserve the right to ban providers who are reported as providing poor care, but parents will still need to vet each one. (Wouldn’t it be nice if in a perfect world we could extend MCC safespace such that all providers found at MCC would offer the best childcare ever? But alas, we can’t save you the legwork).  

Ready to do this?

Great! Choose one of the contribution buttons and complete your transaction. Then message the MCC Page and let us know which thread you'd like to use (the individual or group childcare thread, and If you happen to make your payment using the anonymous option, or if your transaction name is not the same as your name or your business, please send a screenshot of your payment page as well as your thread choice). We will then guide you through the next steps.

Parting thoughts: This is a beta! We are still figuring this out and are open to feedback. If you have any input about the features or the way they are presented, please message us.

Thank you for your consideration. Hugs all around.




About Mama’s Comfort Camp: MCC is a community network that focuses on maternal mental health. Our mission is to normalize the struggles of motherhood, facilitate the asking and receiving of help and support, and foster self-expression and a culture of kindness. Together with over 2,700 members in the Ithaca area we breed ComFortitude: the collective strength generated when we comfort each other.  

Mama's Comfort Camp serves mothers of ALL ages: from mothers-to-be to grandmothers and every stage in between. We provide safe spaces (online and face-to-face) for emotional and social support and honest conversations. Isolation, guilt, and shame are the leading causes of postpartum depression and anxiety. Our support forums create a powerful chain reaction by alleviating these risk factors, leading to suicide prevention and crisis reduction, not to mention improved well being.

Our forums provide constant access to emotional support regardless of time, location, financial ability, transportation, and childcare. For those without access to mental health services, MCC is the closest thing to mental health support — always available and absolutely free.

Our network moves help quickly through direct interactions between individuals in real time, allowing members to support each other in times of need.  We leverage social media to mobilize kindness, ideas, and resources, creating a unique community resilience engine. What’s more: MCC empowers mothers to tell their stories, start businesses, and even run for office!

Our Vision: A world in which mothers are deeply supported emotionally, physically, and economically, and a community in which ALL are seen, heard, and held.

After all, we can’t expect flowers to become fruit if we don’t water the roots. MCC reminds us that it’s not enough to ask: “How are the children?” thriving communities must also ask: “How are the parents?”. It's time to place support where it makes the biggest difference for the entire community.

Mama's Comfort Camp was founded in 2012 by Yael Saar, a postpartum depression survivor who, as a child, lost her own mother to PPD (watch her moving story in this New York Times 4 minute animation: bit.ly/yaelNYTimes). In 2016 we became a nonprofit project of the Center for Transformative Action, a Cornell University affiliate. All our online forums are moderated diligently (emphasis on gently!) by loving trained volunteers who protect our forums from judgment, competitive parenting, and unsolicited advice.

Why we are fundraising:
A staggering amount of invisible work goes into Mama's Comfort Camp. A complex volunteer operation cannot function effectively without a professional backbone holding all the moving parts together. We are committed to never putting any financial barriers for MCC membership therefore we need to seek donations and offer paid listings in our Ithaca Chapter in order to cover our operations costs, including our online moderation structures (volunteer recruitment, training, coordination, and ongoing support), community outreach, and resilience-building activities in Ithaca (support meetings, continuing education, resource-exchanges, and family gatherings).

About Trade and barter:
We want to make this opportunity accessible to as many mothers as possible, so we are willing to get creative with you. We may auction bartered products or find other ways to recuperate the value. Because that means more work for us and we have no guarantee we will succeed in selling your product, we usually double the price; so if you are looking to barter for $30, you need to trade product or services with the market value of $60. Message our FB page at https://www.facebook.com/mamas.comfort.camp to chat about your specific situation. We are confident we can come up with a way to work together.

Thank you for considering supporting our efforts!

And if you are a mother who is not yet a member of MCC, you can find us here: facebook.com/groups/mamas.comfort.camp/


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