Community Guidelines

1. What this space is for

Community, on the Connect tab, is the part of Alani where bereaved parents talk to each other. Everything you read there was written by another parent, not by a clinician and not by Alani Jones Foundation.

It is peer support and nothing more than that. It is not therapy. It is not medical advice. It is not a crisis service, and nobody is watching the feed in real time. If you need care, please read the crisis section below.

2. Who can be here

• You need to be 18 or older to post or reply.
• One account per person. Please do not open a second account to get around a block or a removal.
• Posting, replying and reporting need an account. Reading does not, so you can see that you are not the only one here before you decide to say anything.
• Your posts carry a display name, which is your first name or any name you pick. It is never your email address.

3. What is welcome

Grief in the words you actually use for it. That includes:

• Anger. At a hospital, at a body, at other people, at us.
• The details. What the room was like, how the birth went, what your baby looked like, what you were told, what you were not told, what you had to decide.
• Your child's name, as often as you want to say it.
• Questions that have no good answer, and days when you are somehow fine.

You can be graphic here. Bereaved parents get asked to soften what happened almost everywhere else, so that it lands easier on the person listening, and that softening is its own small loss on top of the first one. You do not have to do it here. Say what happened.

Answering someone by sitting with them counts. "Me too" is a full reply. Nobody here is expected to fix anything.

4. What is not allowed

• Cruelty toward another parent.
• Blame for someone's loss, in any form. That includes telling a parent what they should have noticed, asked for, or done differently.
• Religious or medical advice that nobody asked for, or that is presented as fact. You are welcome to say what your own faith or your own care gave you. Say it as yours.
• Promotion or selling of anything.
• Recruiting for studies, services, groups, or clients.
• Harassment, including contacting someone away from Alani after they have asked you to stop.
• Sharing another person's identifying details, or their child's, without their consent.
• Impersonating another parent, or the Foundation.
• Sexual content.
• Anything that encourages self harm or suicide, including methods.

5. If you are in crisis

Alani is not a crisis service. No one is monitoring the feed in real time, and a post can sit for hours before another parent sees it.

In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. It is free and it is answered at any hour. In an emergency, call 911.

If something you read makes you afraid for the person who wrote it, report the post and contact emergency services. Please do not wait for us to see it.

6. Reporting and blocking

Every post and every reply can be reported from inside the app, and reporting needs an account. That is a deliberate limit: hiding something another parent wrote is not something we will act on from an anonymous request, and one report per person is what makes the count mean anything.

A report adds a flag to that one item. Three flags hide it: it stops being shown to anyone and it waits for the Foundation to read it. It is hidden rather than deleted, so nothing is lost while we look.

You can also block whoever wrote something. Their posts and replies stop appearing for you. Two limits are worth being straight about. A block is kept on the device you set it on, so it does not follow you to another phone. And it does not stop that person from posting. It stops you from having to read them.

You can delete anything you wrote, whenever you want, from the app.

7. What happens when we act

Reports are read by the Foundation. We are a small team rather than a moderation desk, so this is not immediate, and we would rather say that than promise a response time we cannot hold.

When we look at a report, we can:

• leave the post up, if it breaks nothing here
• remove it
• restrict an account, so that it can read but not post
• end an account

Cruelty, harassment, and anything that puts a person at risk end an account. Anything else depends on whether it happens again.

8. Appeals

If something you wrote was removed, or your account was restricted or ended, and you think we were wrong, email legal@alanijonesfoundation.org. Tell us what was removed and roughly when you posted it. A person will read it and write back to you.

Grief is not a breach of these guidelines. We do not remove a post for being hard to read. If yours went for that reason, say so and we will put it back.

9. Contact

Questions about these guidelines, or about something you have seen in the app, can go to legal@alanijonesfoundation.org.

We update this page as the app changes. The date at the top is when it last changed.