Berkeley Parents Network is an online forum for parents in the San Francisco Bay Area of the United States. Despite the name, the discussion board addresses issues in and around Berkeley, relevant to a far greater number of people than solely Berkeley parents. Sending out 10 to 12 email newsletters each week, the network has a readership of over 19,000 people.
Although members do not need to live in Berkeley, they do have to live "within commuting distance," which includes San Francisco, about as far north as Richmond and Pinole, as far south as Hayward, and as far east as Lamorinda. About 90 percent of BPN members live in the East Bay communities of Berkeley, Oakland, Albany, El Cerrito, and Richmond.
BPN was begun in 1993 by Ginger Ogle, as an organization for parents working at University of California, Berkeley.
Members post and respond to questions posted and previously asked questions serve as reference material. Subjects may range, sometimes beyond parenting, from birthday parties to which school to choose to how to find a church. The site includes a "Reviews" section, which covers critiques of local schools and school districts, dentists, doctors, insurance options, and entertainment opportunities.
The site has three mailing lists: Berkeley Parent Network, Parents of Teens, and UC Families.
In 2011 Ginger Ogle was honored as an Outstanding Woman of Berkeley for her work on BPN.
Famous quotes containing the words berkeley, parents and/or network:
“What doubts, what hypotheses, what labyrinths of amusement, what fields of disputation, what an ocean of false learning, may be avoided by that single notion of immaterialism!”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“The child who would be an adult must forgive the parents for all the ways they didn’t raise him or her just right, whether their errors were in loving too much or too little. All parents, as parents of adults, do deflating things that make you feel like a child. If you have children, you’ll do those things too and eventually laugh about them.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)