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Hello Everyone
Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 6:38 am
by bootsie
My name is Hazel and am part of a group of volunteers who have joined together to raise awareness of missing children worldwide.
There are 3 Teams, one for the UK(our base), one for the USA and one for Australia, the latter being my job, Team Leader for Australia.
We work tirelessly to help the children, by emailing posters etc with parental permission.
If anyone has a child you would like us to feature, please let us know.
Also, if anyone has just a few hours a week and would like to help us, again, please contact us.
hazel@foreversearching.com
register@foreversearching.com
Hello Everyone
Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 6:43 am
by Pheasy
Hi Hazel and welcome to FG :-6
What a fantastic thing it is you do. Have you managed to recover many children :-4
What exactly is it you do, and how can people here help? - I know there are many here who would
Pheasy
Hello Everyone
Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 6:45 am
by weeder
Thats a wonderful mission Hazel. I would always help with this, if i could.
Hello Everyone
Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 6:45 am
by pinkchick
Hi Bootsie
Welcome to fg - hope you have fun here

Hello Everyone
Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 7:03 am
by littlemissgiggle
Welcome bootise
I will have a look at the website :-4
Hello Everyone
Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 7:10 am
by Pheasy
I just did. I encourage everyone to look. If anyone one has a bit of spare internet time, (I think we can say we do

), we could help a child somewhere.
Hello Everyone
Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 9:54 am
by Chezzie
Hi Bootsie and welcome to FG:-6
Will go and look at your website too:-6
Hello Everyone
Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 9:08 pm
by Nomad
Can I borrow $5.00 ?
Its really important, I need some stuff.
Hello Everyone
Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 3:53 pm
by bootsie
Hello again,
Thank you all for your messages. I will ignore the question from "Nomad".
We have great things planned for foreversearching for this year.
Firstly we are registering as a Charity, then are going to organise events, tree planting, brochures, leaflets to give out on ways to protect the child, without scaring them and on and on and on.
We want to be known the world over.
We have not found a child yet, but the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children states that the best way anyone can help, is to put up posters wherever they can. We source emails and send out our appeal letter which includes a poster of a child. One day, who knows a missing child may be spotted and in turn is returned home.
Hazel

Hello Everyone
Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 4:36 pm
by G#Gill
Hello Hazel, welcome to Forum Garden. It looks like you have a very worthwhile project on-going and good luck with the charity application. If you become a 'supporting member' you would be able to have the website with an explanatory title as a signature and it would automatically be displayed everytime you post ! :-6

Hello Everyone
Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 4:41 pm
by Pheasy
fuzzy butt;762182 wrote: Ummm where's your website?
please google first guys
The website is
www.foreversearching.com, which I took a look at. Also did the google as you suggested. I could not see anything damning. Do you see a problem?
Hello Everyone
Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 4:51 pm
by spot
ThePheasant;762200 wrote: Do you see a problem?
Only one of efficiency and a productive use of time and resources really. I have in the back of my mind that for a while milk cartons were each printed with one of several thousand missing children's details - photo, name, circumstances, contact details - but that program's become moribund. Presumably it generated more coverage than the posters being discussed here. Presumably it faded because it had no effect. It was a lot of milk cartons too, and the cost of printing and distribution were infinitesimally small per hit compared to posters and websites since the carton handling was no different whether it had missing children or product advertising on it.
Hello Everyone
Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 4:56 pm
by Pheasy
spot;762205 wrote: Only one of efficiency and a productive use of time and resources really. I have in the back of my mind that for a while milk cartons were each printed with one of several thousand missing children's details - photo, name, circumstances, contact details - but that program's become moribund. Presumably it generated more coverage than the posters being discussed here. Presumably it faded because it had no effect. It was a lot of milk cartons too, and the cost of printing and distribution were infinitesimally small per hit compared to posters and websites since the carton handling was no different whether it had missing children or product advertising on it.
I see your point

I thought maybe it was being suggested that something unsavoury was being advertised, and that people were being lured into something ..... less than legal

Hello Everyone
Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 5:11 pm
by spot
ThePheasant;762209 wrote: I see your point

I thought maybe it was being suggested that something unsavoury was being advertised, and that people were being lured into something ..... less than legal
I can't imagine anyone's taken that idea into their head from this thread.
I'd like to ask bootsie why she thinks multiple websites for publicizing missing children is a good idea though. A single site with all missing children would be far more sensible. People would know, if they searched it, that they'd seen everyone who could be seen. With multiple sites it's easy to search just a subset of the sites and draw a mistaken conclusion because the sites which did have the given missing child weren't among those searched.
By all means have different websites offering different forms of access to the core data, but what effort's being made to make all the potential information available through any one site which is being accessed for information? None at all, I'd guess, in which case each proliferation is a backward step in terms of identifying missing children, not a positive one.
You might also like to hint at what it's for, this website. It's a reasonable assumption that absolutely every person who ever looks at a gallery of missing children pics on the Internet is whacko. No sane person is going to stare at hundreds of child photos either asking themselves "have I seen that one" or saying "I'll remember these as I walk round town this afternoon". If someone's worried about a new unaccountable child in the neighborhood are they going to go searching missing child registers? Damn right they're not, they're going to very sensibly call the police in to investigate. What possible function does a website with no law enforcement affiliation satisfy other than enabling intrusive semi-journalistic voyeurism?
Hello Everyone
Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 5:13 pm
by Kathy Ellen
Welcome to FG Hazel....hope you enjoy yourself.
Hello Everyone
Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 4:34 am
by bootsie
Spot, you are quite correct.
This issue is being dealt with as we speak. My position at foreversearching is Team leader and when I joined a few months ago, could see the failings in the websites etc.
We cannot do everything at once and not being an actual Director myself, I have to approach the Board with caution and slowly, but a lot of my ideas are being taken onboard, so we should soon start to see changes.
I have some explaining to do methinks Spot.
OK, disregarding the websites issues spoke about, there has to be a central area where people can go i.e website, we send out millions of emails all over the world, something people can focus on and in this area we have photos of some of our children. No one is going to look at the children`s faces and say "I think I saw that child, yesterday" no, I agree. Police Forces cannot cover every area in all parts of the world, they have asked for our help, so has the ICMEC, any help is valuable. There is also a phone number to report a sighting, on the website.
There are many websites doing the same work we do, but there still needs to be many many more.
When a child goes missing, the story is headline news for a time, then slides into oblivion(except for the Madeleine case). These children deserve better, they deserve people to keep their profile as high as possible.
Yes, we are a small fish in a big ocean, but at least we are doing something.
Hello Everyone
Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 4:41 am
by SlipStream
hi Haz, good work.
Hello Everyone
Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 7:31 am
by Pheasy
spot;762220 wrote: I can't imagine anyone's taken that idea into their head from this thread.
I'd like to ask bootsie why she thinks multiple websites for publicizing missing children is a good idea though. A single site with all missing children would be far more sensible. People would know, if they searched it, that they'd seen everyone who could be seen. With multiple sites it's easy to search just a subset of the sites and draw a mistaken conclusion because the sites which did have the given missing child weren't among those searched.
By all means have different websites offering different forms of access to the core data, but what effort's being made to make all the potential information available through any one site which is being accessed for information? None at all, I'd guess, in which case each proliferation is a backward step in terms of identifying missing children, not a positive one.
You might also like to hint at what it's for, this website. It's a reasonable assumption that absolutely every person who ever looks at a gallery of missing children pics on the Internet is whacko. No sane person is going to stare at hundreds of child photos either asking themselves "have I seen that one" or saying "I'll remember these as I walk round town this afternoon". If someone's worried about a new unaccountable child in the neighborhood are they going to go searching missing child registers? Damn right they're not, they're going to very sensibly call the police in to investigate. What possible function does a website with no law enforcement affiliation satisfy other than enabling intrusive semi-journalistic voyeurism?
It was just Fuzzy's comment about googling it - I thought she had found something
Hello Everyone
Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 9:20 am
by bootsie
Can I ask, why anyone would need to Google the foreversearching website?
Hello Everyone
Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 2:13 pm
by spot
bootsie;762517 wrote: Can I ask, why anyone would need to Google the foreversearching website?
We get a few commercial advertisers who register just to fly-post the site. Some of those adopt a viral marketing tone. Googling their website or their publicity text usually indicates how many sites they've done the same thing to and allow us to gauge our response. The Shrooms thread ends up discussing our level of interest and shows how hard it is to discuss viral marketing with agents.