Start a Support Group

Click hereto join Single Moms Connect support Community where you can type in your zip code and find other women in your immediate community to begin a support group.

Starting a group is easy!
The concept is simple enough to organize in under an hour, and the benefit to your life and in the lives of the single mothers in your community is immeasurable.

Step One
Locate other single mothers in your immediate vicinity by asking friends, neighbors, teachers, or clergy if they know any single mothers. If none are located through word of mouth ask school, church, local newspapers or other organizations if they would print something like the following in their newsletters:

Single mothers interested in joining a single mother support group please
contact (your first name) at (your phone or email).

If you want to give more information:Single mothers support group, first and third Saturday of the month from 6 to 9. If interested please contact (your name) at (your phone or email). The meetings will not be lead by a professional. Potluck dinner from 6 to 7 including the children, then mothers will meet from 7 to 9 while the kids are entertained by a babysitter.

Step Two
Pick a meeting date and time. You may want to leave the kids at home for the first meeting so you can discuss how babysitting might work, how your group wants to structure meetings and how often you want to meet.

Step Three
Everyone gets together at someone’s house. House locations should change regularly so that the burden of the group doesn’t fall to one person. This isn’t about presenting a designer house that you’ve spent all day cleaning. Everyone is in the same boat so you don’t need to impress! Dinner is potluck so whatever is brought is what is eaten. The cost of the babysitter is split between the women who bring children.

Step Four
The Meeting
Discuss how you want the meetings to be run. Here are a few meeting formats that work:

1. Divide the two hours (or however long you’ve decided to meet) between the women who are there. If you have six women and you are meeting for an hour then each woman gets ten minutes to talk. It is important that everyone gets a chance to talk even if they want to talk about everyday things like how their job is going or what is going on with their kids. The sharing time does not have to be reserved for problems, although it can be. It is simply a space the group creates where you can get to know each other and give whatever support is needed. Sometimes that support is simply a safe place where you can be heard.

2. Some groups like to split the meeting into two sections. The first half of the meeting follows the above format then during the second half topics are discussed. The person hosting the meeting usually assumes the job of timing people during the first half and then presenting a few general questions to be discussed as a topic for the second half of the meeting. For example the second half might be about going back to work, helping kids succeed in school or visitation ideas that work.

Support Group Topics
If you decide you’d like to have part of your meeting devoted to discussion of a particular topic in general, here are a few ideas.

• Creating new family rituals
• Dealing with feelings of loss when
  kids are away for the weekend
• Financial planning
• Creating a new social life
• Ideas for coping with grief
  and sadness
• How to stop the divorce war
• Deciding what you really want
  versus what you deserve
• Dating
• Blending families

Make the topics general in nature so they can relate to women in any stage of the divorce process.