Several employees at Mediavine have direct connections to foster care, as either former children in care or as foster parents and, in some cases, as adoptive parents. May is National Foster Care month, and we’ve been working towards this initiative with that in mind. 

The Shine team started with an idea sparked by an employee and impassioned foster care parent — that foster and kinship (that’s when a child is taken in by someone biologically related) families don’t always get the celebration and support that typically accompanies the arrival of a new baby in the family, whether that placement is temporary or permanent. 

There are no meal trains, no baby showers. Sometimes there isn’t even parental leave for a new placement.

We all want to make a difference, big or small. After all, that’s why we created Shine. So over the last year, Mediavine has partnered with several organizations — Foster Source, Hello Bello and the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption — to create the all-encompassing project we call Nurture + Shine, in the hope of making that difference. 

As Renee Bernhard of Foster Source says, “Not everyone can foster, but everyone can do something to support a local foster family.”

The Current State of Foster Care

There is a foster care crisis across the United States. In 2020, 217,000 children entered foster care for the first time. Reunification of families is almost always the goal of foster care, but there are also many children that ultimately need permanent care, creating a rolling effect of need but not enough supply.

State by state, child welfare offices are struggling to find placements for children in need of a soft place to land. 

In my own home state of Texas over the past year, foster care has lost on average 1,000 foster care beds, and there were more than 400 children that spent at least two nights without a placement, which meant they were sleeping in child welfare offices or hotels, sometimes even on the floors of conference rooms.

It’s difficult to think about how that would affect the children in my life, and meanwhile it’s happening to children in foster care all across the country. 

Not everyone can foster, but everyone can do something to support a local foster family.

Renee Bernhard of Foster Source

On the Ground in Denver, Colorado

We’ve focused our initial efforts on Denver, where an employee foster parent resides and was able to connect us to Foster Source. 

Foster Source is an on-the-ground organization whose mission is to help make foster and kinship placements a success through myriad means of support, from sourcing furniture (such as bunk beds and cribs) to providing therapy for care to help with adjustment to respite care so a foster or kinship parent can get a much needed break. 

Half of all foster parents quit within the first year, and Foster Source is providing services in the hopes of changing that statistic. Providing more support for first time foster parents and children means a more successful relationship and placement long term, which is so important for children’s wellbeing.

Next, in steps Hello Bello, the diaper company launched by Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard, with an offer that made many of us tear up immediately: Six months of diapers or household bundles for 25 families in the Denver area, as identified by the Foster Source team as great in need. 

Diapers are hard for so many parents, foster or not. They’re not an expense that is covered by many aid programs, and they can be one of the most expensive purchases new parents have to make in the first three years of a child’s life. 

Hello Bello was a perfect partner for this venture for another reason. The company offers the ability to create a “Diaper Fund”, either for yourself or someone else. 

You can set one up as a baby shower gift. Or you can set one up for a family you know is in need. Or a family can set one up for themselves. 

It works just like other fundraising and giving services. Anyone can donate at any time to a specific Diaper Fund, and those funds can be used towards anything on the Hello Bello website, which has every manner of product, from laundry detergent to baby butt cream. 

A Diaper Fund has been created for each of the 25 families identified by Foster Source, and Hello Bello has funded their first six months of bundles, while Mediavine has funded their shipping costs for those six months. 

It’s Easy to Help Virtually, Too

Additionally, you can opt into Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption PSAs that you can turn on in your Dashboard right now. 

These PSAs bring light to the foster care crisis and point readers in the right direction to learn more about what it’s like to adopt a child from foster care, and how each of us can get involved to support that. 

The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption is the only public nonprofit charity in the United States that is focused exclusively on foster care adoption. The Foundation works closely with child welfare advocates and policymakers, providing free resources about foster care adoption.

Helping Real Families

We’re very proud and excited about this project, because most of all, it helps families like the Radues. 

We’re sharing their foster journey (with words from mom, Ellie) with you so that you can understand the kind of difference foster and kinship parents can make, and the kind of difference a donation like this can make to the families living this journey. 

The Radue Family Journey

My husband and I have been fostering for just about two years now. We have done respite a few times and have had three long-term kiddos. Our very first placement came to us at 2½ days old 21 months ago and is staying for good. He is truly the light of my life. We are unbelievably lucky to spend our days with him. 

When #1 was 10 months old, we took in a sibling set: a 5-month-old girl and a 2-year-old boy. This brought us to three under three! The siblings stayed with us for 11 months and just recently returned home to their sweet mama. 

They are doing really well back home with mom, and we are so happy to have been part of a successful reunification story.

What is your highest high and lowest low of fostering?

I think my highest high might also be my lowest low, if that’s possible! Our siblings reunified last week after 11 months with us. We miss them horribly. They are wonderful, precious kids that we love so dearly. It was hard to say goodbye. 

At the same time, I am so incredibly proud of their mama. She has had an unbelievable number of barriers to overcome and she did it! She worked hard and accepted the help she needed to move through some big challenges and get to a place where she is ready to parent her kids as they deserve to be parented. 

Watching her learn to put her children’s emotional needs above her own and provide safe and healthy foods for her kids brought me almost as much joy as watching her sweet baby girl learn to walk and her little boy learn to speak English. It has been such a privilege to watch this little family succeed individually, and now, together.

What do you wish you would have known before you started this journey?

When you are a foster parent, you have to be very comfortable with not knowing. I am a person who likes to be informed and aware of what is happening now and next and what I can do to positively impact what happens around me. 

Foster care has taught me that more often than not, the answer to my questions are, “I don’t know” or “maybe”. I’ve grown much more comfortable with uncertainty over the past two years!

What do you want others to know about fostering, kinship, and this type of parenting?

Fostering is not just another road to adoption. Fostering is about supporting children AND their parents through the hardest times in their lives with honest dedication to helping them to be together again. 

Of course, it isn’t always possible, but it is essential that foster families start this process knowing that the only goal that matters is achieving safety and wellbeing for the kids in your care, and knowing that the absolute best outcome is for kids to safely return home to their parents.

Also, this type of parenting requires all of you. You need to dedicate yourself to supporting these kids and families with your entire heart, mind, and spirit. 

It is a massive time commitment and can be unbearably exhausting, but it is also 110% worth every second of stress to know that you contributed to a safe and happy outcome for a child who has experienced trauma.

How You Can Help Today

If you’d like to learn more about how to contribute to one of the 25 Diaper Funds, you can visit Hello Bello’s post, 13 Simple Ways to Support Foster Families. 

You can learn more about the programs Foster Source provides and help support them, or find a similar organization near you that could use your time or monetary donations.

Also visit your Mediavine Dashboard to enable the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption PSAs ASAP to get those running. 

The post Nurture + Shine appeared first on Mediavine.

What does that mean? It means I’m working behind the scenes to help shape Mediavine’s public voice through the media.

While my teammates frequent the blog, I spend the majority of my time in the Mediavine Newsroom and in reporters’ inboxes announcing our latest and greatest.

But today I have the honor of voicing our latest and great accomplishments to you. In fact, the topic I’m diving into is a significant reason why I joined the Mediavine team in the first place and why I decided to join the Mediavine Shine committee.

So let’s get to it: Mediavine’s diversity and inclusion initiatives.

As a person of color, I’m proud to be a part of this progressive, mindful company and excited to talk to you, on behalf of Mediavine, about the steps we’re taking to be changemakers.

Diversity and inclusion are a cornerstone at Mediavine. Creating and maintaining a community — both internally and externally — that welcomes people of all backgrounds has always been a mission close to Mediavine’s heart.

But observing the race-related tragedies and hate crimes in spring of 2020 ignited new commitments within Mediavine, not only to ensure our position was crystal clear to everyone but also to foster an inclusive environment in every way we knew how.

Over the last 12+ months, we have yearned to better our operation by listening to and learning from our publishers, team members and society at large.

We’ve taken steps to hold ourselves accountable through tangible, measurable actions and this is only the beginning of our journey as a company.

Following the tragedies of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, Mediavine took a public stand against racial injustice.

We launched the We Stand With You campaign in an effort to ensure publisher awareness and employee well-being, commissioning Black artists to create images expressing racial unity through a variety of creatives.

Since then, we’ve expanded this campaign to support the AAPI community as well, commissioning Asian artists for additional creatives. They can now be seen across many of our 8,000+ publisher websites in place of unsold ad space.

And we didn’t stop there.

We continued launching new initiatives to empower our employees to give back to their communities through donations of cultural and historical books written by African American, Indigenous and other marginalized authors to local Title I schools.

We also began offering monetary matches up to $1,000 for employee donations to social justice or equal rights organizations in particular.

We also realize that our DEI efforts must go beyond race in order to achieve our goal of a safe and welcoming workspace for all identities. So we’re working inwardly and outwardly to encourage LGBTQ+ inclusion.

We’ve input new regulations prohibiting hate speech across our publisher websites, and we’ve begun offering a pronoun display on employee email signatures.

In June, we launched a year-round PSA partnership with PFLAG National, the nation’s first and largest organization for LGBTQ+ people, their parents, families and allies.

At Mediavine, we believe in clarifying our core company values right off the bat, which is why we’re emphasizing our DEI commitments in our onboarding process.

To give potential team members as well as new hires a genuine feel for Mediavine’s culture, we’ve created “The Belonging Project” and “Diversity & Inclusion at Mediavine” videos to reflect who we are.

We also require all employees to participate in a four-segment Traliant training course that educates on Diversity, Inclusion & Sensitivity and Microaggressions in the Workplace, and Preventing Discrimination & Harassment and Unconscious Bias to understand where we stand as a company.

And when new members join our team, we have a community for them. Whether someone identifies as LGBTQ+, a person of color, dog lover, foodie, gardener — the list goes on — Mediavine provides team members with a place to come together via specific Slack channels.

By actively championing our diversity efforts, we realize that also includes intentionally working to diversify our team. We’re proud to say that in tech, an industry known for its lack of diversity on all fronts, we defy the odds.

As of June 2021, our team comprises 10% LGBTQ+ employees, 30% BIPOC employees and 54% female employees. In addition, Mediavine’s leadership is 65% female. And we’re not stopping here; this is our public affirmation of our commitment to continue improving.

As always, we’re humbled by and thankful for our publishers and employees for continuously assisting us in our progress. Your feedback is immensely valued here at Mediavine and has enabled us to reach these milestones.

With your help, we’ve earned our certification as a Great Place to Work®, earned inclusion on Inc. Magazine’s 2021 Best Workplaces list and been recognized as one of Profiles in Diversity Journal’s 2021 Diversity Teams.

During the second half of 2021, and in the many years to come, Mediavine is committed to continuing to foster our relationships with organizations whose missions and values align with our own for PSA campaigns and other projects.

We will continue to strive for even greater diversity and inclusion of all kinds in our hiring.

We want to be a workplace that reflects the communities we serve and which empowers everyone to bring their full, authentic selves to work.

Join us?

The post Mediavine Champions Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion appeared first on Mediavine.

I say this knowing that most people’s experiences growing up queer in the United States have been “interesting.” Everyone’s experience varies wildly depending on location, income, race, age — there are so many contributing factors that it’s dizzying.

But it all boils down to this: We can definitely do better.

Joining my first Big Kid job out of college only six short years ago, I was well aware that it was fully legal in my state for me to lose my job and even my place of housing simply because I was dating another woman at the time. It was an unspoken rule to remain quiet about it, not to make waves and to accept the status quo, just so you wouldn’t upset the wrong person.

If you were truly unlucky, that wrong person could be your boss, landlord or even a family member or loved one.

It wasn’t that everyone in my hometown was openly hostile. It was just that no one wanted to risk having uncomfortable conversations with people who were.

It was easier to expect the bisexual girl starting in the editorial department to keep things to herself than it was to address the elephant in the room: that the unwillingness to have this conversation was in and of itself a form of homophobia and that silence enabled even more harmful forms of homophobia.

I can’t begin to explain how alienating it can feel, living that double life — and to be clear, you have to keep that double life up in your private life, too, if you have family members that might disapprove; for plenty of people, this charade is a full-time gig.

Communication is fundamental to how you interact with the world around you. Your conversation partner might mention their spouse casually, with no one thinking anything of it; perhaps a cousin’s boyfriend stops by the family get-together to say hello. It’s casual, relaxed and not generally considered a big deal.

However, these simple things were luxuries that were almost off-limits to me as a queer person. If my then-girlfriend stopped by, she was to be referred to as my “roommate” or my “friend.”

For all intents and purposes, I was considered single despite being in a 2-year relationship.

While I was so much luckier than so many others, LGBTQ+ discrimination runs deeper than any of those things.

It pervades every nook and cranny of society.

But how can that be homophobic? This isn’t a picket line of people waving signs telling me I’m going to hell. I was fortunate enough to retain the support of my family when I came out to my parents. I wasn’t disowned or kicked out of the house. I’d never been assaulted, and I could deal with ignoring rude words from people.

While I was so much luckier than so many others, LGBTQ+ discrimination runs deeper than any of those things.

It pervades every nook and cranny of society.

The headlines rightfully go to the atrocities committed against LGBTQ+ people. We need to know about the suicide epidemic in the LGBTQ+ community; we need to hear about Mathew Shepard; about the Stonewall Riots (and not the white-washed version given to us by Hollywood).

We need to hear about the fact that 2020 was the deadliest year on record for trans individuals, with 45 people murdered — up from 26 in 2018 and 2019.

Because these hate crimes don’t come out of nowhere.

They come from a culture that prioritizes “not making waves” and keeping people feeling “comfortable” over the right for members of a marginalized community to live as their authentic selves.

So many people point towards the legalization of gay marriage as the “end” of homophobia. We clearly don’t care about whether people are gay or not anymore! Look, they can get married! Are you happy now? Can we please stop talking about things that make me uncomfortable?

Yes, that couple can get married. And that’s fantastic! But that isn’t going to guarantee a “happily ever after” situation for them.

We live in a country where sexual orientation and gender identity aren’t considered protected classes, where “don’t ask, don’t tell” has permeated into the very fabric of our day to day lives.

On the day that gay marriage was legalized, I was working as an editor in a news room. I was so excited. My heart soared. The moment I heard, I was texting my girlfriend that I would pick up something extra special that night for dinner to celebrate. And then one of my coworkers turned to me and said: “I’m happy for them. I mean, I don’t know any gay people, so it’s not like it affects me at all, anyways.”

These words were so close to support. So, so close. And while I know these words were not uttered in malice, they still hurt to this day — because she did know someone. She knew someone that this was directly affecting, and she was looking right at her.

And while I know these words were not uttered in malice, they still hurt to this day — because she did know someone. She knew someone that this was directly affecting, and she was looking right at her.

It is impossible to have discussions around the LGBTQ+ experience without acknowledging its history and without acknowledging the ways in which it was failed by our larger community for so many years.

The LGBTQ+ community came together to support one another when they could not count on outside forces to do so.

They protected each other from dangerous situations (physical and sexual assault, emotional abuse, conversion therapy and so much more) when they couldn’t count on impartial treatment from law enforcement.

Community members come together to form a found family when blood family doesn’t come through.

They pulled together to care for members of their community during the height of the AIDS crisis, which killed so many LGBTQ+ people.

We have come so far. And those wins should be celebrated!

But the marathon is not over, and we can’t allow ourselves to become complacent.

Even within the LGBTQ+ community, we have to do better. 2021 is no place for homophobia. It’s no place for biphobia, transphobia, acephobia, misogyny, racism, ableism, xenophobia or any other form of discrimination, harassment or harm.

Equal Rights are not achieved until they are attained by everyone. And I’m grateful to work for a company like Mediavine, which recognizes this.

I’m proud that Mediavine stands with me in support of the passage of the Equality Act, federal legislation that would modernize our nation’s Civil Rights laws by including explicit protections for LGBTQ+ people, as well as improving protections for women, people of color and people of all faiths.

Mediavine stands with me in support of legislation that serves to protect trans and nonbinary kids and opposes the hundreds of state bills introduced across the country this year — all of which harm trans and nonbinary people and their families.

Mediavine has been a great place to work, a place where I feel that I am able to bring myself to the table 100% as I am. Where my experiences and insights are not only accepted but encouraged.

Mediavine has been a great place to work, a place where I feel that I am able to bring myself to the table 100% as I am.

I am able to mention a girlfriend unabashedly in a work chat without it turning into a huge deal. Coworkers ask for advice about how to encourage diversity and inclusion for their LGBTQ+ coworkers because they genuinely want to make them feel more comfortable and valued.

My coworkers, LGBTQ+ and ally alike, understand and support my fervor for the charities serving my community.

There is an excitement from the entire company to include, understand and welcome members of a community that has existed on the periphery of society for so long. There is a desire to include them in the way they wish to be included.

It means more than words can even begin to describe and is a reason why I am so excited to see Mediavine partnering with PFLAG National, not just for Pride month, but throughout the year.

PFLAG’s work in more than 400 communities across the country — including towns like the one I grew up in — will ensure that queer kids who need support from their families, their teachers, their neighbors and their peers will get it through PFLAG’s support, education and advocacy programs. 

Pride is as important now as it was on June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, where trans women of color were on the front lines changing history.

Pride is a chance for us to come together and love ourselves in a world that may not always love us back. 

Pride is a chance to celebrate the beautiful, varied forms of love and acceptance that the human race has to offer.

It’s a time to come together as people, for people. Pride is first and foremost about Love — and Love Is Love.

The post We Stand With You During Pride — And All Year Long appeared first on Mediavine.