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A Conversation with… Sona Mehring
Founder and CEO of Caring Bridge
Interviewed by Eden Kozlowski, ATH Supervising Editor

Michelle Gregg, ATH Senior Editor: Hello All Things Healing readers and listeners! I’m Michelle Gregg, Senior Editor of ATH and I’m delighted to bring someone very special into your life today. Our exclusive interview is with Sona Mehring who has a very special story out of which grew an amazing organization called Caring Bridge. Sona is going to share that special story with us today so I won’t let you in on that just yet, but let me tell you just a bit about Caring Bridge. It’s a service that creates websites for people who are ill or injured and who want to stay connected to their loved ones during the healing process. These completely free websites are intended to create a bridge between the person healing and their loved ones in the most stress free way possible so that everyone involved easily stays informed of recovery – and anything else that’s important during that healing process.

Sona has been recognized many times since she created that first Caring Bridge website back in 1997. She was named one of 2011’s “Most Influential Women in Technology” by Fast Company. In 2010 she received the Health Care Heroes Award from Twin Cities Business magazine. In 2009, she was named one of 25 Women Industry Leaders in the Twin Cities by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal. Sona also has received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition for outstanding service to the community, was recognized by MSN.com as one of the nation’s leading Women Working for Change, and was an honoree at Medica’s 2004 Speaking of Women’s Health Conference.

Sona, we are so honored to have you with us today – welcome!

Sona Mehring, Founder and CEO of Caring Bridge: Thank you. It's a pleasure to here.

Interviewing Sona is ATH’s very own and very wonderful Supervising Editor, Eden Kozlowski. Eden works her magic by recruiting and training the All Things Healing editors – those experts who bring you the vast library of incredible information that we share with you every day. Eden is a Meditation Teacher and the proprietor of JustBeMeditation.com, teaching classes in the Ohio area. Welcome to you Eden!

Eden Kozlowski, ATH Supervising Editor: Thanks Michelle.

Michelle: Ok! Thanks so much to both of you for being here today and we’re ready to hear all about Caring Bridge…

Eden: Ok, let's kick this off. Sona, first I want to tell my personal story as to why we have you on the phone today. Essentially I remember it distinctively. Two years ago, it was Thanksgiving at my family’s house and they had just heard news that a family friend, their son, was in a very challenging accident with a swing set.  Every parent can heart wrenchingly relate to what happened. And my aunt told me, “Well you know you should get on Caring Bridge. They have a page there so you can follow the events that are happening.” It was amazing because I was here in Ohio, they were in California and I could be so much a part of their life and watch the progress of their son. It was almost like I was living this event with them. It was amazing. And that’s how I came to know about you guys.  So it’s so neat to have you here today to really hear how this was created, how it all unfolded. So let’s start in with this first question.

So, obviously Caring Bridge is such a connective tool for people who are facing long-term illness and recovery and for those who are caring for their loved ones. So tell me in your own words what Caring Bridge is and how it works and just about this wonderful compassion technology…

Sona: Well thanks Eden for the story you started with. I think it was interesting how it was at Thanksgiving where you’re gathering together with your friends and family. That’s what Caring Bridge does. Caring Bridge is actually a non-profit that’s dedicated to helping people through their health journeys to really amplify the love, hope and compassion that are part of everyday life but can be needed to be brought together. We do that primarily through an on-line service - we turned to the World Wide Web. We use on-line technology to be able to connect people across the street or around the world instantly bringing them together when they’re going through a health journey - any type of health journey – from pre-mature birth to childhood accidents, car accidents, cancer treatments, heart diseases, end-of-life situations, wounded soldiers coming back. Just a whole variety of health journeying from acute conditions to chronic conditions. And we’re bringing together their friends and family, amplifying that love, hope and compassion.

Eden: Mmm. That’s wonderful. I hear there‘s a very personal story behind how Caring Bridge got started. Will you let us know how it all came to be?

Sona:  Well it was 14 years ago and if you think about 14 years ago, especially in the idea of technology or even the World Wide Web – that was long time ago! 1997 was even a year before Google existed and who can go a day without Google? I don’t know.

It was a very personal story and I think great things in life come out of personal needs. A very close couple, friends of mine, had a very premature baby. The mother was actually in the hospital for a few days and asked me to let everybody know what was going on. I knew it was going to be impossible to make all those phone calls so I actually turned to a strength of mine. My background is in technology – I’m very passionate about technology. I’ve always been a very early adopter of technology. I knew very early on that the internet in particular had just this unbelievable power to connect not only people, but just everything around the world, truly making the world quote-unquote “smaller.”

So I love to talk about how the same night their baby, Brighid, was born that the first Caring Bridge site was also born. Of course it instantly eased the burden of me making numerous phone calls and the emotionally draining telling of the story over and over again. But the “wow” event was truly connecting those hearts behind the keyboard bringing together that supportive community, like I said, whether they were across the street or even around the world – instantly knowing what was going on with my friends Joanne and Darren, and their baby Brighid, and really amplifying that love, hope and compassion. It was just this “wow” event for me, being someone who is so passionate about technology. Technology usually gets this bad rap about being a cold, impersonal, “gonna rip society apart” kind of thing, where here technology was being used to bring people together. It was a very rich, very emotional experience.

Brighid’s life was a very short 9 days – but her impact is still felt today. Caring Bridge is named after Brighid and we really consider Caring Bridge her legacy. Brighid would be 14 years old this year. And from that one story of Baby Brighid - to fast forward 14 years and know that Caring Bridge has really had significant impact. In the last 12 months 43-million people have come to Caring Bridge to be connected to another person.

Eden: Wow. And really that’s how I relate to my own story. I’m here in Ohio, the friends that had the incident are in California, my family is in Atlanta, and it did –  it acted like this tool to bring us all together. And just like you said, I didn’t even think about that, that when you’re trying to tell a story, especially something that’s personal to you, how repeating it can energetically and spiritually just keep knocking you and knocking you, even if you’re getting support from the other end. And you’ve touched on this a little bit, but are there more, when you talk about the emotional benefits for those who use Caring Bridge – what other items in that line would you say?

Sona:  There certainly is the saving of time – that is obvious – and that saving of emotional energy. Telling the story, not only for the patient, but for the caregiver is very stressful and emotionally draining. I mean heck, when we go on vacation we get tired of telling about a happy vacation time. You can imagine what it’s like re-telling something that’s very stressful.

But there was a study done about 5 years ago that has helped me visualize how Caring Bridge has helped so much. It was a study about people when they have been diagnosed with a serious condition – the number of people that reach out and actually connect with them is cut in half, because people don’t know what’s going on, they don’t want to quote-unquote “bother them,” the caregivers themselves become isolated and many times they fall ill. And also those visitors, those friends and family don’t know what to say, don’t know what’s going on and ALL of that is not only helped but is actually turned around by Caring Bridge because that patient can now very easily tell people what’s going on – their caregiver can tell people what’s going on, and people understand what’s going on and can lend support – be it just leaving a message behind or it could be that there’s more organization so that maybe there’re some meals brought over.

But it is just the idea that it is that community is brought together, amplifying that love, hope and compassion. We know it has become very therapeutic not only for the patient but for that caregiver just as much, who is also right their going through that journey.

So saving time, emotional energy, that therapeutic ability of being able to tell people what’s going on, and the love and hope and support that is really just amplified throughout the Caring Bridge website or through their mobile devices.

Eden:  And sure too, like you said, not knowing the right words to say, but when you go to Caring Bridge and you see the words that other people have written there it does make it easier for you to go “oh ok, now I can maybe talk through this and maybe give them something and feel comfortable about it.” Oh that’s great! So how about tell us this. There’re so many stories that have come through Caring Bridge – there must be hundreds you could share. Do you have certain one’s that have stood out through your Caring Bridge experience?

Sona: Yes, there are and you know, being the Founder and CEO of Caring Bridge – well, number one I wear a lot of logo wear because I’m very proud of it, and people come up to me and say “How do you know Caring Bridge?” And I’ll answer them and they’ll tell me their story. And there are just literally – and I mean this happens every day – there are literally hundreds of thousands of stories. Like I said, there are 43 million people in the just the last year.

But the highlight of course is Bridgett’s story which I always carry around in my heart. But also very early –  you know I mentioned that Caring Bridge is a non-profit – I had never run a non-profit before Caring Bridge, and have really come to understand the power of charitable giving. But very early in the life of Caring Bridge, it was early in 1998, and I wasn’t really thinking of it as a non-profit. A woman sent me a check – a $100 check – and I actually called her back and I was thinking “What are you doing?”

She was this grandmother, and at the time we weren’t an official charity so I knew it wouldn’t be a tax-deductible gift. In that conversation - and this was one of the first meaningful conversations that I had with someone – this was a woman who was in California who wasn’t able to visit her daughter who lived in Ohio, I believe in Cleveland. Her daughter had had a daughter.  And she said I would’ve never been able to see my granddaughter without Caring Bridge. And it really was just another testament to the power of Caring Bridge.

Then a few years later a woman called me from up-state New York and told me she just had to reach out to me because quote-unquote “You saved my husband’s life.” He was at this point where he really had lost hope. And she had been the one as the caregiver who got the Caring Bridge site up and she was gaining all the love, help and support from it. Her husband really didn’t have much to do with the site, so she had been typing on there saying “my husband Dan is really depressed and losing hope.” She thought she had really gained so much from this, so she literally rolled him over to the computer and he spent that evening reading through the Caring Bridge messages and it changed everything around for him. That was really impactful.

Every day we get so many great messages and as I was thinking of doing this interview I thought about what we do that we call profit-sharing. Every couple of weeks people on our staff will gather up the messages that we’ve received from other people. So I’m literally looking at an email that was sent out last week that has about 2 dozen messages that people have sent in. So from last week someone sent in this message that says, “Caring is alive and well thanks to all the wonderful people who make up Caring Bridge. It sure brings home the fact that that is what America is all about – caring. You have restored my faith in fellow-man to a new level. I love it!” So you know it’s that underlying “wowness” if you will… I’m sure part of his experience was around 9/11 the way he mentions America in that way.

So it’s those stories that frankly we hear every day that this are really – this idea of amplifying love, hope and compassion is something that is very tangible and something that is very much alive not only in America but around the world.

Eden: Oh and I’m just sitting here going to myself, “Wow, wow that’s so great!”  So let’s go through some of the step-by-steps. If someone wanted to get started with Caring Bridge, what are the first steps, what sort of technical experience do they need to have? How do they know how to do it?

Sona:  So you need no technical experience because we’ve taken care of all of that for you. Caring Bridge is extremely easy to use. There are many ways you can do it, but the easiest is you can go to CaringBridge.org and right there on the home page it’s very easy to see how to create a site. You can either be creating a site for yourself or for someone else – you can even give Caring Bridge as a gift to someone else. There’s a way to actually create a site yourself and then send it to someone else.

It’s extremely easy, within 5 minutes you can have a Caring Bridge site created. With my passion around technology, we also very much understand that the world is changing around technology, so I’ve been proud to say for almost 2 years now that “we have an app for that” so if you have an iPhone or an iPad you can download the Caring Bridge app and easily create a site from there. There’s a Droid app and you can create a site from there, and we also have a mobile site so that if you’re on your mobile devices, which so many people are, especially if there has been an event, and maybe you’re in the hospital, you go to CaringBridge.org and there’s a great mobile experience. It’s extremely easy to create a Caring Bridge site and then invite others to join that community to help amplify that love, hope and support.

Eden: Oh super. Okay. So our last question.  What would you most like our All Things Healing readers and listeners know about Caring Bridge and what’s coming up for you and this wonderful, wonderful caring company?

Sona: Oh thank you! Well, the number one thing I always want to bring up is that Caring Bridge continues to grow primarily by personal recommendation. It is one of those caring things that people do for each other.  So any of your readers and listeners, as they’re thinking about anyone they know in their life that is going through some type of health journey, let them know about Caring Bridge. You can do that by going to caringbrigde.org and there’s a “Tell a Friend” – you know very easy to send messages. Or just refer them to the site or tell them download the app.

We grow by personal recommendation so one of the top things I always tell people is to spread the word! Help us make sure we impact more people, because even though we have had significant numbers of people using Caring Bridge there are still a lot of people out there who could benefit and get help with a Caring Bridge site. So that’s number one.

We continue to want to do more in the area of caring throughout a health journey. When I look ahead to what Caring Bridge can do, compared to 14 years ago, the environment, especially people connecting on-line, and I mean social networking on Facebook etc., has just exploded over the last 3 to 5 years. It’s wonderful that people are on-line and connecting. A big difference between a Caring Bridge and a Facebook - I always say that Facebook is very much for small talk and Caring Bridge is for when there needs to be meaningful conversation or meaningful connection. Many people who are using Caring Bridge might also be using a Facebook page. But we are special in that we are 100% focused on amplifying love, hope and compassion during someone’s health journey.

Eden: That is great. Wow. Well thank you so much for chatting with us today. I’m sitting here just feeling inspired and I’m so glad that we can help tell people about you guys as well. So thank you so much. Michelle if you want to close this out, that was wonderful.

Michelle: Yes – what a fantastic organization you’ve created Sona, I’m just – I got a little bit choked up actually thinking about the soldiers coming back, how wonderful it would be for all of them to know that this is available for them to use. Just listening to you today helps us all to remember that caring really is universal. I want to thank you for sharing and for creating Caring Bridge.

ATH’ers you can find out more about Caring Bridge by visiting www.CaringBridge.org. And do please leave your comments about what you’ve read or heard here. Just scroll down and let us know your thoughts in the Comments box just underneath this interview, or visit our PsychoSpiritual Forum to create or join a conversation there.  To find the Forum go to the top of any page on our website and you’ll see a link that says Forum.

So Sona thank you, Eden thank you, and thanks to everyone for spending time with us today - with Sona, Eden and with All Things Healing. And until next time, be well!

Have a comment or question? Visit our PsychoSpiritual Forum to start or join a conversation.

About Sona Mehring

Sona is the founder of CaringBridge. She created the first CaringBridge website in 1997, during a friend’s high–risk pregnancy. With extensive experience in the information technology industry, Sona’s vision was to build upon that formative and deeply personal experience – combining the capabilities of technology with the personal needs of people facing a significant health challenge. In the years since, Sona and CaringBridge have become widely known for the creation and implementation of Compassion Technology™ that facilitates personal and convenient communication for individuals receiving care.

Sona is frequently recognized and honored for her passion and visionary leadership. She was named one of 2011’s “Most Influential Women in Technology” by Fast Company. In 2010 she received the Health Care Heroes Award from Twin Cities Business magazine. In 2009, she was named one of 25 Women Industry Leaders in the Twin Cities by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal. She also has received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition in recognition of outstanding and invaluable service to the community, was recognized and highlighted by MSN.com as one of the nation’s leading Women Working for Change, and was an honoree at Medica’s 2004 Speaking of Women’s Health Conference.

Sona is a member of Women Business Leaders of the U.S. Health Care Industry Foundation, Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, National Health Council and the National Health Marketing Leadership Roundtable.

An early adopter of Internet technologies, Sona has been actively involved in the development of several widely used software applications.

Find Sona on Twitter at @gogosona.

For more information visit http://www.caringbridge.org/leader.

About Caring Bridge

In 1997, founder Sona Mehring’s close friend suffered a life-threatening pregnancy. To keep family and friends informed about the critical situation, Sona created a website.

The site allowed family members to communicate information to a wide circle of people without disturbing the mother’s need for rest or placing additional demands on hospital staff.

Fighting for their lives

Baby Brighid was born almost three months premature. With her mother in critical condition, the one-pound preemie was quickly rushed to the Newborn Intensive Care Unit at Children’s Hospital in St. Paul, Minn.

Baby Brighid

The family posted daily news about mom and Brighid on the website. An accompanying online guestbook enabled visitors to send the family messages of love and encouragement.

Sadly, Brighid’s story does not have a happy ending. After a nine-day struggle against tremendous odds, she died in surgery.

An outpouring of love

The website allowed the family to convey this saddest of news without the painful burden of several emotional phone calls. The parents also had a place to post a final message to honor Brighid and their supportive online community.

Brighid’s death prompted an outpouring of loving messages to the family. They immediately understood that other patients dealing with the birth of a premature baby, childhood cancer or other critical illness would benefit from the same web resource.

A memorial fund, created in Brighid’s memory, enabled Children’s Hospital in St. Paul to dedicate a computer and Internet access for patients and families wishing to create their own online communities.

And CaringBridge was born.

Click here for personal stories on Caring Bridge.