A Plea from Black and Missing - Help If You Can

If you are African American and your child goes missing, chances are your child's story will not make it to NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN or FOX. LIKEWISE your child's story won't make it to the Tom Joyner Morning Show or Tavis Smiley's Radio Twitter TV Smoke Signal. You will join the ranks of parents with missing children, 33% of which are African American, whose children do NOT get media coverage. But there are a number of people online whose entire platforms are dedicated to highlighting Black people who are missing. One of those platforms is Black and Missing.

Deidre over at Black and Missing but not Forgotten is a crime blogger a specialty which requires covering all of the stories of missing and murdered Black people that get buried beneath an avalanche of Real Housewives of Atlanta sightings.  Its not an easy task. I know I have a limit to the number of crime stories I can cover without taking a break, but Deidre has worked tirelessly on behalf of Missing, Murdered and Found Black people and she's asking for help.

I don't usually do this, but I need your help. As some of you may know (If you added Black and Missing on Facebook - a link is provided on the sidebar), I will be going back to school SP 10 for my Bachelor of Biology with a concentration in Forensic Science. This will allow me to go further with my blog by going behind the scenes and working directly with missing and unindentified persons. I hope to work in a crime lab by the time I'm done so that I can more quickly help locate missing persons as I post about them.

Some of you also know, that I have a 8 month old daughter. She is the reason for me keeping up with this blog and also the reason for this post. I need your help in paying for her tuition at daycare. Right now I am short on funds, having to pay my own tuition and other bills. If you would like to donate, I created a paypal button below. You can also donate if you just like the blog and would like me to keep going with it. Black and Missing but not Forgotten

You can go to Deidre's site if you are interested in making a donation.

In this time where many of you are likely experiencing economic hardships of many varieties, life may get in the way of you blogging. There is NOTHING wrong with walking away, you can always come back. For example, I turned the day to day operations at Michelle Obama Watch over to someone else. Appointing a managing editor was one of the best decisions I made. I will likely NEVER return in a management role over there unless she leaves. I love it!

In November I'll be walking away from the internet ( except Twitter, its a great procrastination tool) for National Novel Writing Month.

The best memory I have from Blogging While Brown 2009 was at the end when a trio of students from my blogging boot camp came up to me to tell me that they were going to take my suggestion and start a group blog instead of going it alone. We've reached a point in the blogosphere when some of you might consider doing more than "collaborating" you might want to consider outright consolidation.

All this being said, the reason I was able to do this was because I met my managing editor in person on multiple occasions and had an opportunity to work with her on unrelated projects. That built up a requisite level of trust.

So in sum, do NOT try to do it all. Infrastructure is going to be our "watch word" for 2010. Once you've built it, how do you maintain it?