I promised that I would share details of a pro bono writing and editing project that occupied pretty much all of my free time September through November. It was the creation of a brand new family resource guide for our rural county. Not my original idea, but one whose time had come and whose goal struck a chord with me, so I jumped on board in late summer. We published the first week of December.
The idea was to pull together descriptions of and contacts for the limited and sometimes hard-to-find parenting resources in our county and spare new parents the angst of searching for them and/or missing out on them altogether. The support groups, classes, and baby activities for new parents in this county of only 26,000 people are really few and far between. If it takes a new mom three months to hear about one she needs, that's really too late and/or valuable time has been lost when she needed the support. I certainly fell into that category for multiple resources, as I struggled to find my new identity as a parent in Port Townsend -- even though I'd lived here for nearly a decade before having Soren!
Dubbed The Little Guide for Little Ones (and Their Families), the 75-page printed booklet contains comprehensive descriptions—not just listings—of community resources, kid-friendly businesses, and age-appropriate events and activities for children aged birth to 5. We will consider going to a website in the future, but for now, the print version is it and worked the best for soliciting advertisements to defray the costs of printing.
It was produced as a community project of and fundraiser for the Port Townsend Cooperative Playschool, which Soren and I have been a part of since May 2010. Every Thursday (we had a session this morning) we meet up with a dozen other parent-child couples and learn and play. It's been a great socializer for him.
Anyway, I pulled more late-nighters on this guide than I did in four years of college, simply because the scope kept spreading and there were always facts that needed to be checked and checked again. Oh, and did I mention I have next to no free time?! As I wrote in the guide debut press release:
"Out of habit, I tracked my hours on this pro bono project—then wished I
hadn’t!” Randall admits. The owner of the communications consultancy Story
Services estimates she spent 100 hours over the last three months co-authoring
and editing The Little Guide. On one fact-checking phone call with a social
service agency, she was taken aback by the question, “So, where’s your funding
coming from?”
“We’re all volunteers, which is incredible because we’re all part-time
working mothers of young children and have very limited free time,” says
Randall. “But it was a labor of love.”
Read the full press release and see photos of my co-creators (with their kids) on my website, here.
I hosted a book launch party at our studio apartment on Dec. 11 and it was a stunning success in two ways. One, I created a Gift-A-Guide wishlist of family resource agencies and organizations in our community who could benefit from having a guide on their reference shelf, and several copies were sponsored by donors who were truly glad to have the opportunity. I didn't think about matching philanthropic impulses with community need until just two days prior, when I attended the holiday party for our local community foundation (I also volunteer as a steering committee member for the new Fund for Women & Girls). Mingling with our community's prominent philanthropists was a reminder to me to incorporate giving into this project, and to model that for our children.
Two, a columnist from the Peninsula Daily News dropped by at my invitation and stayed over an hour and interviewed every parent who came through the door. She wrote up a brilliant piece that really hit the nail on the head and can be read here. (Soren isn't in the picture because Jeff had taken him on a walk to escape from all the excitement.)
But Soren's first editorial photo did appear in our weekly paper, the Port Townsend Leader, as he posed with me holding copies of the guide hot off the presses. The article (just a rework of my press release) is not online, so here's a scan of the intro with our picture.
Want a copy or want to sponsor a guide (for $10) for one of the eight or so remaining organizations on the Gift-A-Guide list? Let me know!
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