By JEREMY MARTIN
The Beacon

Laura Ladd knows the struggles of being a single mother. In the late 1980s, she found herself divorced with a young daughter, sleeping on a futon in the dining area of a small one-bedroom apartment in Ocean Beach. So close to the kitchen, she was systematically stirred from sleep by a noisy refrigerator. In her mind, she didn’t have many options.

All of that changed when she placed a classified ad in a local weekly stating she was looking for another single parent — preferably a single mother with a girl — to share an apartment. She was almost overwhelmed with the number of respondents. She ended up moving into a three-bedroom apartment with a woman who is still her best friend.

Her new situation allowed her to follow a career in marketing and advertising while raising her daughter, Erin, the way she wanted to. It also gave her the idea for her new Web site, www.ForSingleParents.com.

The database-driven site, which was launched in April, gives single parents a chance to get support from others in their situation, in three main areas: housing/roommates, exchange childcare and friendship/dating. Membership is free and users can seek each other out by typing their zip code into the database.

“I was divorced when my daughter was 11 months old,” said Ladd, a Brooklyn, N.Y. native who moved to California in 1979. “When I moved into the apartment with the other girl and her daughter it saved all our butts. For the first time in a long time I had my own bedroom and bathroom. We shared the duties of watching each other’s daughters. It was great because I was paying so much for sitters. I looked at all of the other people that I wasn’t going to live with and wished I could help them.”

With so many responses coming from her first ad, Ladd decided to put out her feelers to see if there was enough demand for single parent support to start a full-blown business. She placed another ad in an attempt to gauge the potential interest in such a service. Once again, the number of responses was plentiful.

“I got hit with all sorts of mail,” she said. “The response was very positive. Many people said that if I was going to start a business like this, that they would be interested in hearing more about it.”

Due to a family emergency, her idea lost steam and eventually became only a memory until 2000 when a friend brought up the subject at a party. It just so happened there was a man there who had overheard the conversation and decided he would like to help fund the project with some money he had recently inherited. The concept was suddenly reborn.

Ladd took the money, approximately $50,000, and began contracting a company, Abaris Technologies, to build her database. More then two years later she launched the site, which has steadily been gaining members ever since. She currently has more than 15,000 members from the San Diego area, due largely to her extensive grass roots marketing efforts, and the word is slowly getting out across the country.

“There are more than 10 million single parents nationwide, and I would like to have every one of them as a member,” said Ladd. “There are no ads on the site and membership is free. This site is about helping real people.”

To help get the word out, Ladd has pitched the local media, landing features in the San Diego Union-Tribune and ComputorEdge magazine as well as a radio segment on KOGO-AM. She is also starting a public relations campaign on PR Newswire in order to reach media outside of Southern California and even goes as far as to hand out flyers at the Farmers’ Market on Wednesdays in Ocean Beach. She also gets help from her current members, some of which send out chain letters to all their friends. She has been very pleased with the initial response.

“As long as there are people who get divorced, or people that die, there will always be single parents,” Ladd said. “Being a single parent has a negative connotation. There’s a stigma attached to it.

With single parents getting so much help form Ladd’s Web site, it’s not wonder that even those who are married search the site as well.

“I’ve had couples ask if we could do childcare for married parents,” she said. “I may someday, but I want to help people who are really struggling. We are all going to be better off if these people have resources, because it hurts all of society if they don’t.”