Jeanné Hannum is the proud mother of four children. Each of her children has gone off to do great things–her oldest daughter is a food and personnel safety manager at Wegmans, her oldest son is a Navy petty officer, her youngest daughter is a Navy veteran and new mother and her youngest son is a Fulbright scholar. With such accolades, it seems that Hannum kept her children quite occupied as youth, but she said things were not so simple.
“I would have liked to have had a resource when I was a young mother with four children at home,” Hannum said. “I now enjoy finding things my granddaughter and her friends would enjoy doing.”
Hannum’s granddaughter and longing for an activity-filled resource inspired her to join the Macaroni Kid National e-newsletter. The newsletter started in early 2008 as friends and fellow mothers Joyce Shulman and Nicki Hemby shared a meal. Shulman came up with the idea of publishing a weekly newsletter of local events for mothers and their children in East Hampton, N.Y. Hemby agreed and they began publishing Macaroni Kid online in May 2008, going national a few months later.
“Every kid is a Macaroni Kid, not just ours,” Shulman said on the Macaroni Kid National website. “Let’s offer Macaroni Kid to mothers everywhere!”
Hannum joined Publisher Moms, the group responsible for nationwide publications of Macaroni Kid. She said it gave her a sense of solace.
“I was looking for something creative to do,” Hannum said. “I had been dealing with health issues which kept me from a lot of physical activity. [It seemed like] a creative outlet for me and a potential source of income.”
She launched the Northeast Philadelphia branch of Macaroni Kid in October 2010, with additional coverage in East Montgomery County.
The neighborhoods Hannum covered in her branch were never a question.
“Macaroni Kid National wants the newsletters to be ‘hyper-local,'” Hannum said. “And since I live in Northeast Philadelphia, that was the logical base for me.”
In the months since the Northeast launch, the e-newsletter have not received the number of subscribers she would have liked. Hannum attributed it to focusing most of her energy on family matters. Both she and her husband, Charles, were diagnosed with cancer this year and her oldest son was deployed to Afghanistan.
Despite the setbacks, she still pushes on.
“Macaroni Kid has helped me stay in the moment because I have a weekly deadline to meet,” Hannum said. “Other than a couple weeks after my last surgery, I have gotten the newsletter out each week and continued to have timely and interesting content.”
“[It] helps me keep a young heart and keep up with what children are doing and what they like now.”
Be the first to comment