Berkeley Parents Network was started in 1993 by Ginger Ogle, then an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) graduate student at UC Berkeley and the mother of 2 school-aged children. The list was originally intended for student parents in EECS. In conjunction with the UCB student organization Women in Computer Science & Engineering (WICSE), we were working on a proposal for parental and maternity leave for grad student parents. Ginger set up the mailing list to "rally the forces". The EECS faculty accepted our proposal and we subsequently used the mailing list to get a child-friendly office for parents in Soda Hall, along with diaper changing tables in the men's and women's restrooms.
As the mailing list grew by word of mouth, most messages were beyond the scope of just the EECS department, so in 1995 we opened it up to all UC Berkeley campus parents, calling it "UCB Parents". Word traveled fast as students, staff, and faculty on campus began to get email accounts. The list that had started as "eecs-parents" with 14 graduate students in 1993 reached 250 members in March 1996. That year, Ginger set up a website "parents.berkeley.edu" and began archiving some of the mailing list discussions - preschool recommendations, summer camps, and parenting advice. View the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for BPN's website circa June 1997.
By 1998 BPN's membership had reached 1000 members. We opened the list up to all parents in Berkeley regardless of UCB affiliation as the result of a collaboration with a local moms' group called Neighborhood Moms (later called Neighborhood Parents Network, but now defunct).
By 1999, now with 1600 subscribers, any parent "within commuting distance of Berkeley" could join the mailing list. Ginger was now working for a research project in the CS department at UC Berkeley and continued to run the list and website on a server within her research group. The weekly email newsletter was split into four parts to make it more manageable, and new moderators volunteered to help: Laurel Coates, Myriam Godfrey, and Tamara White. That year, a separate list for parents of teens was also started by Sally Nasman, whose children attended King Middle School and Berkeley High School.
Membership reached the 2,000 mark in 2000, and by the next year, membership had doubled to 4,000. View the 2001 Member Survey. The end of 2003 found our membership nearly doubled again, at 7,600 and we reached 10,000 members in the Fall of 2004. Throughout the 2000's we continued to add around 20 new members every week. Subscriptions were free, and we allowed schools, daycares and other child-related businesses to subscribe and post about their programs.
BPN's website and mailing list were hosted on servers at the UC Berkeley campus from 1993 until 2014 as "parents.berkeley.edu." Although BPN was never an official project of UC Berkeley, the campus generously provided resources including server space and technical assistance for no cost.
From 2012 to 2014, with more than 30,000 subscribers, BPN volunteers and pro-bono legal services worked to create a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization for BPN in an effort to ensure long-term sustainability. We raised funds from our subscribers to pay for a new website, which we launched in 2015. We created paid "Community Subscriptions" for schools, childcare providers, and other local kid-related businesses and organization who wanted to publicize their programs on BPN. These subscriptions allowed BPN to pay for technical and administrative services as well as a director, while keeping subscriptions free for parents.