The Child & Adolescent Bipolar Foundation (CABF) is competing for a $250,000 grant from The Pepsi Refresh Project during the month of December. The winners will be decided by popular vote so CABF needs your vote every day this month! They are currently Number 2 in voting, so every vote counts.
There are over 5 million U.S. youth who live with depression or bipolar disorder. Unfortunately, only a small percentage receive treatment. CABF will use the grant from Pepsi to raise public awareness and help more youth who suffer from depression or bipolar disorder. They also intend to use the money for greater outreach and to expand their website to include more mental health concerns — not just bipolar disorder — that children and teens deal with.
Less than a minute of your day for the rest of December can have amazing long-term benefits for children and teens. Learn more by going to www.bpkids.org/pepsi.
Click through to vote now…
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Doesn’t anyone else find this incredibly sad? The Pepsi Refresh Project? What does it mean when important organizations, trying to do good in the world, must compete for funding offered by soft drink makers? And they will simply use the money for raising public awareness, making their website fancier, and for “outreach”? (So for PR essentially)
This should be a huge disappointment to anyone who actually cares about helping people with psychological disorders. Everyone votes, giving Pepsi lots of free advertising, and then the CABF uses all of the money for advertising and public relations. Regular people feel like they did something good, large amounts of money get spent, and nothing of any importance is achieved in the end. It’s sad that clinical psychology is simply another business. It’s just like selling Pepsi, only with a less tangible product.
At least spend the $250,000 on something meaningful, like research, or support programs. This is just a publicity stunt.
Hi Anonymous,
I work for CABF. We are very excited at this opportunity to help so many more of the youth diagnosed with depression/bipolar.
If CABF wins, the funding is _not_ “all going to advertising and website upgrades”. To the contrary.
Here are our goals:
* Expand awareness of depression & bipolar
disorder in youth
* Educate parents about symptoms and treatments
* Enlighten the public about teen suicide
* Eliminate the stigma associated with
childhood mental illness
* Extend hope to families raising children with
a mental illness
Here’s the budget in support of these goals:
$ 25,000 Advertising, Marketing Strategy Development
$ 60,000 Online advertising, ie. Google, YouTube,
Yahoo
$ 20,000 Social networking consultant, part time, 9
mos.
$ 25,000 Online video, production costs
$ 25,000 Podcasts for teens, incl. production &
salary costs
$ 25,000 Educational Webinars for parents,
$ 20,000 Print Materials, incl. brochures
$ 35,000 Outreach to Mental Health Professionals,
Educators
$ 15,000 Crisis Line Volunteer Training, incl.
materials
While this involves outreach, it isn’t outreach for outreach’s sake or simply “advertising”.
Sorry, I left one thing out.
The goals and budget above are listed publicly on our voting page here:
http://www.refresheverything.com/cabfhelpsmorekids
Hi –
I am not posting as “anonymous”. I want you to know who I am.
I’m a mother of a child with schizoaffective disorder, who has found immense help, amazing resources, and comfort through CABF.
CABF isn’t some large impersonal organization. It’s parents exactly like me. Everyone from the Executive Director on down to the volunteers as a child with a severe mental health issue.
CABF has over 30 online support groups, monthly support programs where experts come and answer questions and give advice, a family response team that responds to every parent asking for help with resources and information to help them, and reaches out to doctors and schools and communities to help educate them on the signs of childhood mental health problems and suicide prevention.
If you think this money is going to “advertising,” you either don’t know what that word means, or you haven’t bothered to read the text on the very page where you vote that details where it is going.
Chrisa Hickey
sorry – typo – my third sentence should have read, “has a child with a severe mental health issue.”
What is sad is that organizations dedicated to making a difference and supporting families and children are perpetually underfunded. In these difficult economic times charitable donations have declined significantly as well as grant dollars. While one may not care for the product, the Pepsi corporation is giving nonprofits the possibility to obtain funding that otherwise would not be available.
CABF has historically run a very lean budget with minimal dollars spent on operating costs. It remains one of the best kept secrets in the world of support for children and families impacted by mental illness. I gladly donate each year because I know that my contribution will go directly to support services.
A common message heard from parents who find CABF is ‘I wish I would have known about this years ago’ or ‘I wish CABF had existed when I was growing up, so much pain and heartache could have been avoided’. Winning the Pepsi grant would mean that CABF could promote their programs and services so that more families could get the help they so desperately need. And CABF could offer more programming, more services so that no family would have to live in isolation or struggle to find resources and treatment.
Our family would have been lost without CABF. I cannot think of an organization more deserving or more fiscally responsible to win the grant.
A grateful CABF parent.
CABF literally saved my life and sanity when I first joined ten years ago. My girls had just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and I needed someone, anyone to understand. I was terrified!! I didn’t want to lose my daughters the same way I lost my mother to suicide.
CABF offered me the support, knowledge and resources to help my girls.
Today they are alive and happy and I am giving back to an organization that is reaching out to parents who feel the same way that I did.
We aren’t looking for a fancy website. CABF is a safe haven and that is what we want it to remain for the many parents who need us.
To anonymous: I’ve been a member of CABF for over 10 years – I don’t know what I would have done without the support, friendship I’ve received from my support group or the information and resources on their website which have helped me deal with the schools and psychatrists, etc.
You said it’s all just a publicity stunt. Not sure what that means but I know I don’t agree. The way I read it is that CABF is trying to inform families and the public about BP and depression — so that they will get the help and support that they need. The earlier the treatment…the more positive the outcome.
No longer Hopeless — because of CABF
Don’t know why you
I wasn’t expecting this kind of response, but here is my reply:
1) I meant to comment more on the fact that Pepsi has to get involved, because there should already be money going to things like this. It’s an important issue which needs to be funded, but in a much better way.
2) @ Chrisa Hickey. You say: “If you think this money is going to ‘advertising,’ you either don’t know what that word means, or you haven’t bothered to read the text on the very page where you vote that details where it is going.” The post before yours (by a CABF employee) breaks down where the money goes. The following is within my definition of advertising:
$ 25,000 Advertising, Marketing Strategy Development
$ 60,000 Online advertising, ie. Google, YouTube, Yahoo
$ 20,000 Social networking consultant, part time, 9 mos.
$ 25,000 Online video, production costs
$ 20,000 Print Materials, incl. brochures
$ 35,000 Outreach to Mental Health Professionals, Educators
Although, to be fair I do not work for the organization and if some of these things (such as the brochures) are not exactly advertising, then I apologize.
3) I’m not here to tell anyone how to spend their money, so CAFB should do whatever they like. I simply feel, personally, that many organizations which depend on donations spend far too much money “raising awareness,” when this might be better spent on the actual programs being delivered. I am currently doing my Master’s degree in Communications and I know that many not-for-profit organizations spend lots of money on ineffective campaigns that do little for the organization in the long run. I was hoping that the money would go towards things such as the crisis support line and the family response team.
4) Finally, I’m sorry if I offended anyone with my comments because I wasn’t trying to insult the organization in anyway. I simply see far too many groups focusing on “raising awareness,” when a focus on concrete programs and real-world impact usually translates into free press from other sources. If you know how to manipulate the media, they can do a lot of outreach for you, for free. But those are just my thoughts and good luck to the CABF.
anonymous –
1. Most nonprofits make their money from donations. The government can’t fund everything that does good in this country. If a company wants to step up to the plate and run a contest — the Pepsi Refresh Project, in this case — I don’t think we should be denigrating that company’s efforts. Instead, we should be thankful they are trying to do good things with some of their profits. Who cares if they make soda? What does that have to do with a company wanting to do good??
2. CABF came on here and answered that about $85k of the money is going to be targeted toward advertising. I can’t speak for them, but after speaking with their executive director before posting this entry, I can understand why they want to go down this road. They already have a wealth of great resources available on their website. Sadly, most people don’t know they exist. To try and reach parents who might benefit from their information, the simplest way to do this is to advertise when people are searching for information on the big sites like Google and such.
You can disagree with this marketing and outreach approach, but it’s often more constructive to do so in a way that offers reasonable alternatives, given the stated mission and purpose of the organization. For instance, this isn’t a research organization, so it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to mark that money for research.
I think we’re all entitled to our opinions about how grant money should be spent.
If you have specific ideas on how you would better reach the tens of thousands of parents that an organization like CABF is trying to reach, I think a lot of people would be interested to hear your suggestions (I know I would).
I am so excited about the prospect of helping these young people. I wrote a term paper for College in the early 1990′s about making it mandatory for schools to teach about mental health which is just as important as physical health. Aced the paper but the Professor wrote across top of paper…who would fund this? This type of organization is my dream come true. Don’t forget to vote~
I might have been a child with BP, I at least was EI as a kid and now bipolar as an adult. It is EXTREMELY hard to grow up with these kinds of disorders. People don’t know what it’s like when the slightest little thing that irks you fills you with emotion so much that you feel you screaming and crying and kicking… I mean, I even screamed over the fact I didn’t like the spelling of my last name when I was a kid.
Please vote and help these kids out!
I really fear that this is going to lead to more children being unnecessarily medicated. So many children who get labelled bipolar are living in extremely dysfunctional family environments, and medication isn’t going to solve that.