A specialty birthday cake baker relocating to Naperville wanted to tell her new community about her business. A single mother was looking for play dates for her children and supportive friends for herself. A woman whose family was preparing to move to Naperville had questions about schools, neighborhoods and child care.
They all turned to the Naperville Moms Network.
“If I talked to every single one of our 13,000 members, they all would have a different story,” said Dr. Cathy Subber, a Naperville chiropractor and owner of the nearly eight-year-old group, which offers networking opportunities, friendships and support to women in Naperville and surrounding communities.
Naperville Moms Network was created in December 2009 by Kelli Thompson, an office manager and marketer in Subber’s practice, Advanced Health of Naperville. Thompson was pregnant with her first child and new to the area, without nearby friends or family.
While Thompson could find plenty of online resources and support groups for women experiencing pregnancy and new motherhood, she wanted a way to translate that virtual experience to real life. She created NMN with a social network software that allowed members to “friend” others, message them, and form subgroups of their own.
More important, members began gathering regularly for social events and networking.
I met Thompson when I was west suburban bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune and joined the network as a way of connecting with readers and finding ideas or sources for news stories.
Thompson quickly grew the group to 1,000 members, and Subber, “very aware of its potential,” signed on as a sponsor. When Thompson’s husband was transferred to Texas in May 2011, Subber took over the NMN and three years ago migrated its discussion groups to Facebook.
Today, anyone can sign up for free membership on the group’s website, www.NapervilleMomsNetwork.com, and get information on Facebook groups or the email newsletter there. You can also like the Facebook page Naperville Moms, with almost 10,000 connections, or join any of the Facebook groups such as the Naperville Mom Forum, with almost 11,000 members. Anyone with questions can email Subber at DrCathy@napervillemomsnetwork.com (subject line NMN).
You don’t have to live in Naperville to join NMN — Subber estimates only 65 percent to 70 percent do. You can be as active in the group as you want to be, from commenting on online discussions to attending social events to sponsoring a networking lunch.
Facebook is home to NMN subgroups ranging from Single-Child Moms to “Seasoned” Moms, from a cooking club to a bunco group, from a buying-and-selling page to a professional business events and happenings page.
“If I see a need, I can just create it,” Subber said.
At this stage of my life, the NMN is a great business networking resource. The group sponsors seven or eight lunch events each year that draw 35 to 60 attendees for open networking, lunch and a guest speaker on a topic of personal or professional development.
“One member told me her business is up 30 percent since she joined,” Subber said. Another said she had lived in the community 13 years but didn’t feel she had put down roots until she had made friends through NMN.
One of the highlights for Subber was the “Journey of Motherhood” project the group sponsored in collaboration with photographer Terri Roper. Over two years, 36 members agreed to be photographed in their real-life daily situations, “the anti-Christmas card photo,” Subber said.
One woman was photographed as she sat in a closet talking on a phone with her kids gathered noisily outside the door. Women worked in messy kitchens, children doing homework or playing nearby.
“My picture was me in my dirty car,” Subber said.
Each of the subjects wrote about their motherhood experiences, and the photos and words were displayed in a special event at the DuPage Children’s Museum earlier this year.
“It was an absolutely moving evening” that brought many people to tears, Subber said.
“Sometimes there’s this feeling that in Naperville, you have to be a certain size and drive a certain car and work a certain job,” she said, but the project showed that “your life doesn’t have to look like someone else’s life.”
That supportive networking of real, live women has been the best thing about the network, she said.
“It has exceeded my wildest dreams at the joy it brings me helping Naperville moms connect.”
Susan Keaton, a real-life Naperville mom and freelance writer, is a Naperville Sun columnist. You can contact her at keatoncolumn@outlook.com.
