ILCA Community Guidelines
The International Lactation Consultant Association (ILCA) is the professional association for International Board Certified Lactation Consultants® (IBCLC®) and other healthcare professionals who care for breastfeeding families. We have created online communities with the goal of stimulating dialogue on global breastfeeding advocacy in a safe and productive manner.
When posting on our social media sites, we ask that you:
- Keep it friendly and positive. We are here to support one another as we provide and expand breastfeeding support worldwide.
- Stay focused on ILCA’s values, vision and mission. We have one overriding objective: creating a dialogue that will help to transform world health through breastfeeding and skilled lactation care. While we understand that many of our supporters may be active in other issues, we ask that you not post on topics that may divide our community. These include politics, religion, and circumcision (except when these topics are within the scope of lactation and are handled with respect for all community members).
- Promotion of products/services. Please do not promote your business, sell items, fundraise for organizations other than ILCA or conduct business in our community. If you would like to promote an event and are unsure if it falls within our guidelines, please contact us at media@myilca.org.
- Personal attacks. Please manage disagreements thoughtfully and respectfully. We value the conversations that will help us all learn more by engaging in healthy dissent. Please ensure that your comments respectfully articulate your disagreement with a person’s ideas and do not attack the individual. We will protect our community as a safe space by deleting comments that are abusive or do not respect community members. Any poster whose comments are deleted more than twice will be eligible to be banned from our social media communities.
- Respect all members of our community. Comments that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic will not be tolerated. Similarly, comments that are not supportive of people of different abilities, sizes, or religions are prohibited and will be deleted.
- No medical advice. No information that ILCA shares should be construed as medical advice. Our site cannot provide medical advice online or respond to specific requests for support around a specific issue. Please contact your healthcare provider for health care concerns. To find a lactation consultant in your community, please see the Find a Lactation Consultant Directory on ILCA’s website.
- Keep your personal information safe. We strongly discourage you from sharing personal information, such as your phone, address, or email address in any social media platform we maintain.
- Ensure copyrights and personal information are protected. Please do not share photos, videos, or other information that is either copyrighted or for which you do not have permission.
Please bring your questions about our community policy to a moderator. If you have questions about this policy, please feel free to message us privately on Facebook or email us here at media@myilca.org. Social media is intended to be used as a forum for discussion that will help to transform world health through breastfeeding and skilled lactation care. Please do not post publicly with questions about why your comment was deleted. If you are truly unsure, contact us and we’re happy to share with you our reasoning.
You can find ILCA online at:
On Facebook at facebook.com/InternationalLactationConsultantAssociation
On Twitter at @ILCA1985
On Instagram at ILCAworldwide
On Pinterest at pinterest.com/ILCApins
ILCA can be reached on any of these platforms or via email at info@ILCA.org. We can also be reached by telephone at [number] 9a-5p M-F US eastern time.
ILCA is an international community. We post all dates in the international format of day month year (for example, 5 May 2014 or 15 June 2015.) We post all times based on the U.S. Eastern Time Zone. To convert your local time zone, please consult this time zone calculator. [link to http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html ]
