ByJodi Smith Lemacks, Esq.,National Program Director of MendedLittleHearts
Mended Little Hearts (MLH) has been supporting families with children who have congenital heart defects/disease (CHD) since 2004, which coincidentally, is the year Facebook was started in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Two MLH groups, one in Hollywood, Florida and one in Fresno, California, began to bring CHD families together in their local communities to provide support, education, awareness, advocacy and to connect families with resources. The need for connection and support led to many more MLH groups forming in local communities today there are over 80 groups around the nation.
Fast forward to today. Facebook took off as a way for people to connect online, along with Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat and other social media forums.
We more often than not connect to people quickly online, or even over text, with simple letters rather than words. Text words like LOL and BFF have become part of our language. Most people have devices with them at all times where they can instantly connect to each other.
It is estimated that teens spend an average of nine hours a day on social platforms and the average person spends nearly two hours on social media every day.
Not only has the time on social media platforms increased and taken away from the time we spend in-person with each other, but social media has altered our perception of things as well. Value on social media is dictated by number of followers, number of Likes, or number of views rather than by what people are actually doing to make the world a better place. And, social media can be deceiving, or as some like to say today, Fake news.
Organizations, like people, can create personas on social media that reflect whatever reality they want reflected, and many people believe it.
Organizations can position themselves favorably to seem more popular, wealthier, more successful and even morally superior based on whatever image they choose to portray. What is often lost in this, because it is neither glamourous, nor exciting, nor splashy, is real people doing good deeds to help and support each other person to person, face to face.
MLH certainly has a nice social media following and does many things that do get into the public eye, and we value and are grateful for our online connections.
But what people dont often see, and the crux of who we are, are the one-on-one human connections that meaneverythingto that person who just found out her baby will be born with a heart defect, to the parent sitting in the hospital by his childs bed praying his child survives, to the parent home with a child for the first time after surgery who is scared to death something will happen, to the family member of the older child who has to go in for heart surgery and is terrified, to the mom who just said goodbye to her child for the last time, and on and on.
These moments, these connections, are not social media moments they are not going to be followed by thousands of people yet they are the heart of MendedLittleHearts.
What others dont see because they are small and quiet, are the calls, emails, cards and letters from people saying how their lives were touched when they needed it the most by Mended Little Hearts volunteer leaders.
So, in a world of splashy social media activities, for MLH, it is not the number of people who see what we do on social media that counts, but the person whose hand we held, whose concerns we listened to, and whose child we placed in our hearts.
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