Apply to donate your extra breast milk by April 30, 2012 and be eligible to receive a
$300 Reimbursement for your breast pump!!!
click here for details
We’ve made becoming a breast milk donor as easy and convenient as possible! Milkin’ Mamas works in partnership with Prolacta Bioscience. All milk donated through Milkin’ Mamas is sent directly to Prolacta’s lab to make human milk fortifier and standardized human milk, processed from 100% human breast milk. Click here to learn how donated breast milk goes from donor to recipient. After just a few simple steps you will be on your way to becoming a Milkin’ Mama.
Click here to DONATE BREAST MILK now!
Initial Screening: The first and most important thing is to make sure that breast feeding your infant is established before you decide to donate any excess milk. We only want you to donate excess breast milk after your baby is fully fed. You can donate excess newly expressed milk or previously collected frozen milk up to 10 months from date of expression as long as it is clearly marked with the month, day and year of expression. We ask that potential donors have at least 100 ounces of frozen breast milk ready to donate before applying. Please call or email us and we will go over some pre-screening questions with you and address any questions or concerns you have. Once the pre-screening is completed, you will be sent an email with a link to the Prolacta Bioscience on-line application. Click to view our Pre-Qualification Guidelines.
Online Application and Review: In order to be eligible to donate your extra breast milk, you must first complete an on-line application. A link to the on-line application will be emailed to you once you have completed a pre-screening via email. The application includes a Consent (to donate) Agreement and a medical history survey with about 50 questions similar to questions you answer prior to donating blood. It will take about 20 minutes. Once your application is processed, you will receive an email with detailed information on how to proceed next.
Medical Confirmation Forms: The milk you donate will be used by Prolacta Bioscience to create nutritional therapies for critically ill and premature infants. To ensure the quality of the product, we require that the donor have her medical provider and her infant’s medical provider sign a confirmation form ensuring that both mama and baby are healthy and it is okay for mama to donate her excess milk.
Donor Testing: A Donor Test Kit will be mailed to your home. The Kit includes all of the supplies for blood and DNA screening as well as a thermometer for your freezer. A screening blood test will be arranged through a national laboratory and will be done in your home, at no charge to you. At the same time, you will be asked to provide a cheek swab sample to create a DNA identity profile. Later, when you ship in your milk donation, the DNA in the milk will be matched to your DNA identity profile to ensure we only receive milk from donors that have been screened. This is a critical step to ensure the safety of the milk that will be used to nourish critically ill and premature infants. To ensure that your freezer is cold enough to properly store breast milk for donation, please turn your freezer down to its coldest temperature setting. Your freezer needs to be -4 degrees Fahrenheit (-20 degrees Celsius) or colder to safely store donor milk. You will be asked to give a freezer temperature reading during the qualification process.
Shipping Your Donation: Once you are qualified as a donor, you will receive notification with detailed instructions on how to pack and deliver your milk to the milk processing lab. You will be sent a specially designed shipping cooler, gel bricks and a prepaid FedEx label with which to ship your milk to the lab. At this time, if you will be an “on-going donor”, you will be provided with breast milk storage bags to be used for future donations.
Please click on our Breast Milk Donation Check List to get a detailed idea of what is involved in becoming a donor.
Although we are located in Southern California, Milkin’ Mamas is able to accept milk donors from throughout the Continental United States. We ask that applicants have at least 100 ounces of frozen breast milk ready to donate before applying. It should be noted that prospective milk donors are not offered any financial incentives.
The entire application process takes approximately 2-4 weeks. This time frame depends a lot on the eagerness of the donor and how quickly the Medical Confirmation forms, the freezer temperature reading, the blood testing and DNA samples are completed. All costs for testing and shipping are covered and there is never any cost to the donor.
We care about keeping your personal information confidential; our database is secure and our record keeping is HIPAA compliant.
