By All Means

About every five minutes, someone, somewhere in the world, creates a CaringBridge page. The Minneapolis-based social network makes it easy for people to communicate with loved ones during a health crisis by creating a centralized, private place to share updates and ask for help. Sona Mehring created CaringBridge in 1997. It started with a simple website designed to help friends share news about their premature daughter, Brighid. The power of that instant connection—at a time before Facebook and Twitter—prompted Mehring to build CaringBridge, a platform that was available, for free, to the public. From the newborn intensive care unit at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics in St. Paul, CaringBridge has grown into a global nonprofit with users in 235 countries. Mehring, a tech entrepreneur who was early to the Internet—launching her own web page design firm in the 1990s—talks about her decision to turn CaringBridge into a nonprofit, and leave her day job to run it. “I have a nonprofit heart with a for-profit mind