Breastfeeding Support for Indian Mothers(BSIM) is a peer to peer support group for breastfeeding mothers, their partners and family members. Breastfeeding Support for Indian Moms (BSIM) which is a Facebook Group was founded in the June 2013 by Adhunika Prakash (who is now a certified Lactation Educator and Counsellor) with the intention of empowering women with information. Initially, it was a Pune based Facebook group, but as the number of members from across the country increased, the group was renamed and target audience was widened. The Facebook Support group which has about 1,45,000+ members is where BSIM team members help mothers with breastfeeding queries 24X7 for no monetary benefit. These members are at various stages of their breastfeeding journey, ranging from pregnant to those with older children following natural term nursing. Even though the group is primarily targeted towards Indians, we do have members who are from various countries and cities across the world. Some members have been inspired by the group to get professionally trained in the area of Lactation. The group's size has increased purely by word-of-mouth publicity by members that have benefitted from the continuous support provided by the group. All these mothers hope to empower women with information to enable them to take informed decisions along their breastfeeding journey. We have some medical professionals on the group as well that wish to get educated about breastfeeding. There is a wealth of information available on the Facebook group for women in different phases of pregnancy to women that wish to feed their child until the child self weans. BSIM strongly believes that all parents do the best they can for their children based on the information and support available to them, and therefore we limit ourselves to being information providers. We welcome members from diverse parenting philosophies and abstain from telling parents how to parent their child. Our goal is to provide information and leave the decision making to the parents themselves. Even though BSIM started off as an online community, we are gradually increasing our offline presence. We have held meet-ups in 12 cities across 3 countries, and have regular meet-ups in about 6 cities. Cities where frequent meet-ups were conducted:
1. Pune
6. Kochi
With time, we hope to increase our offline presence in more cities, and empower more women.
