CaringBridge – When Families and Friends Need Each Other Most

Over the past year or so I’ve had too much experience with the CaringBridge site. The site is a place for individuals and families going through a hard time to reconnect and stay in touch with their extended family and network of friends. My specific involvement with CaringBridge came as a close friend of ours was diagnosed with very aggressive lung cancer, but has never smoked a day in his life. I’ve had another friend who’s little boy is fighting a variety of illnesses and setup a CaringBridge website. Then there’s a distant, teenage cousin that’s fighting cancer as well. As you can see, too much contact, but there was never too much contact and communication with these friends and family members.

A place to heal, celebrate and share.

CaringBridge® is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization offering free personalized Web sites to those wishing to stay in touch with family and friends during significant life events. Our mission is to bring together a global community of care powered by the love of family and friends in an easy, accessible and private way.

CaringBridge functions as a customizeable website that families can setup to share their updates as they work through some of the medical treatments and challenges they’re going through. There are six main sections to the custom sites: my story, journal, guestbook, photos, links and tribute. The sections are self-explanatory and the journal section works like a blog to some degree, with the single drawback of not being able to subscribe to updates with an RSS feed.

If you want to really be inspired, read the story of my friend and former boss, Matt Lemmons on his CaringBridge site. If you have a family member or friend that’s struggling and you’d like to be able to stay in touch easier, let them know about CaringBridge.