Blogger Stories

Blogger Story: Melissa Fletcher

You never know where this adventure in blogging will take you. Or how your blog focus will change. Just ask Melissa Fletcher. Melissa launched her blog to keep in touch with friends and family as she chronicled what her tag line describes as - "living life one mistake at a time." Love that line! This summer Melissa began including posts about her passion .. helping people easily live sustainable "green" lives.

Blogger Story Teller: Melissa Fletcher, Alotta Errata

I  love your concept, and enjoy reading about why and how other people got started blogging. For me, blogging began as a way to keep in touch with my friends and write down the little bits of humor I found in my life. I also found it was good practice for writing effectively. Who couldn't use a little practice?

Over the last few months I have found that  blogging has become a way for me to learn about myself. Writing down my thoughts and feelings so that others can understand forces me to really think about what I am feeling and what my goals are.

I have learned more about myself through blogging than through simply talking and thinking. While some people keep a private diary for  this reason, I feel as though the written word is a commitment to my readers. Even if I have one reader, my words are my promise and my truth.

Now my blog is helping me to chronicle the changes I am making to live a more environmentally and socially responsible life. I hope that maybe others will see that the changes can be simple and very rewarding; that you don't have to be "crunchy granola" to be green!

Blogger Stories: Cooper Monroe & Emily McKhann

I heard Cooper Munroe tell her story at BlogHer 2006 and knew I had to include it in Blogger Stories. Cooper and Emily McKahnn are two "mommy bloggers" who proved that social media can impact not one life - not two lives - but thousands of lives. Their one small act of kindness, to help Katrina Moms, led to a nation-wide relief effort of moms helping moms. Theirs is a story of a new way of giving using 21 century technology with heart.

Blogger Story Tellers: Cooper Munroe and Emily McKhann, The Been There Clearinghouse, The Motherhood

On August 31, after screaming at our televisions for two days, "Why isn't anyone helping these people?", we decided to turn our blog into a community corkboard of sorts where people could connect one-to-one, immediately and without intermediaries.

Having lived through 9/11 in New York and seen the mountains of donations flood into the city, only for the supplies to be stockpiled in distant warehouses because no one knew what to do with them all, we felt certain this could happen again in the Gulf States.

We -- two Moms who live in different towns and share a blog -- realized that the thousands of people fleeing their homes with nothing to their names would be going to temporary residences. They would have addresses. People could send packages to survivors directly.

We asked readers of our blog to list on our site the goods and supplies they would donate to people displaced by the hurricane.  At the same time, we arranged for housing placement services, which by Thursday, September 1, had hundreds of thousands of rooms donated and available to survivors, to send evacuees to us once placements were made.