Hello DSR members!

My name is Jessica Frantz and I have been working as an intern this summer with the Donor Sibling Registry.  What an amazing opportunity this has been and continues to be! Every success story I hear fills my heart with joy.  I feel blessed to be involved with an organization that brings happiness to so many.

With a grant from the Arcus Foundation Gay & Lesbian Fund and the support of the Women and Gender Studies department at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the focus of my internship is to extend DSR outreach to the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) community.

Approximately one-third of the children searching for their family members on DSR are from GLBT-headed households.  While the Donor Sibling Registry is a non-GLBT specific organization, we are strongly supportive of GLBT civil rights, equality, and diversity, and are uniquely positioned to be a watchdog advocacy organization to ensure that GLBT prospective parents and donors are treated equally and fairly.  We are seeking to build coalitions with GLBT specific organizations so that our alliance will be broader and stronger.

The outcomes we are targeting include:
-Coalition partnerships with GLBT nonprofits for advocacy and education;
-Greater awareness about DSR and the issues of raising donor conceived children in the GLBT community;
-Greater number of GLBT registrants.

In order to assess the extent to which these goals are achieved, we will measure new registrants to the DSR over a time period and track how they heard about the DSR.  We also will measure the number of people reached by the circulation of newsletters.  We will look at the number of coalition partnerships and their quality based on frequency of joint activities, commitment to ongoing joint activities, and the interest from the leadership level of our coalition partners.

I am now in the phase of this project where I need input from DSR members who are members of either the GLBT or straight community.  I am interested in your comments, questions, and advice on extending DSR outreach to the GLBT community.  I would also love to hear from GLBT members about their experiences with the DSR, as well as any GLBT parenting or family-organizations you have been involved with or that you feel could possibly benefit from becoming partners with the DSR.  You may email me at JessicaFrantz@yahoo.com .

As the Donor Sibling Registry continues to be pioneers in building a more inclusive concept of family, I look forward the future and hearing from you!

Sincerely,
Jessica Frantz
JessicaFrantz@yahoo.com

We continue to have people come to the site to research clinics and specific sperm donors. A reminder: we have many user comments and stories for most of the sperm banks on our “Resources” page.  You will need to sign in with your username and password to be able to view the lists.

There is at least one website that “helps” people choose sperm banks and donors, although they do not include any information on how those sperm banks have dealt with past clients and no information or feedback from the families who have had to deal with the sperm banks post pregnancy. People are then choosing donors with no idea of how many families have already had children from the donor, and no idea of any medical issues that have occurred in the offspring or even the donor himself. Frustrating… as I see people come to the DSR all the time so surprised to see families already having children from their donor. I also see how important it can be to make contact with families to share and keep up to date with medical information.

I remind everyone to please post, as if you contact a match without posting, they oftentimes contact me to make sure of the legitimacy. If they can actually see the match, your match families will feel a lot more comfortable returning initial emails. I estimate (by how often I correspond with match families not posted) that the DSR has between 25-50% more matches than we actually show on the site. Remember, many do not post until they see a match…so if you are not posted you could have matches also out there also watching and waiting!

As we prepare for a busy website in July due to the Oprah re-airing, I remind everyone to please check your email address on the DSR to make sure it’s current. I spend a lot of time helping people reach their matches who have not updated email addresses on the site. (This is why listing snail mail addresses is also so important).

Remember to check your spam folders, as I hear that some of these DSR member to member communications end up in people’s spam folders.

As always, my fingers are tightly crossed for those of you who have been waiting on the site for a long time. Every time we have a media bump, so many more of you get to connect.

On another note, more of an update, we have had a very busy June, surpassing last years numbers without any huge media. Last June we had Primetime and this year…who knows why we’re so busy. Maybe people are reading the recent magazine coverage (“O” Magazine, Cosmo, Der Spiegel and Newsweek) in their doctor’s offices? I have heard some amazing connection stories (lots of people meeting up this summer!) and also see that more and more people are using the “medical” pages to share important medical information with their matches. I see that more donors are coming to the site to share and update their medical information that families would never get to know otherwise.

Cambridge University and the DSR are presenting a talk at the ESHRE meeting (European version of ASRM) in Barcelona next week, that comes from the Cambridge Research we conducted on the site last year. We also have a paper waiting for publication approval at the journal “Human Reproduction”. More papers to come as well. Please check on the “Research” page of the DSR for updates. Thanks to all who participated!

Please remember to sign in with the same username and password you already have on the DSR- if you forget, please go look at your posting to see your username. People write all the time wondering why they can’t get a new username to sign on….only one username per person please. And if you forget your password, the site can automatically send it to you. All internal member to member DSR messages sent and received can be seen on the “Add to Registry” page.

Also, we have a “How Do I…” page if you need help.