The day the number wouldn't let go
Karmel was a mother of five in Provo, Utah, when she learned something she couldn't unlearn: around the world, mothers were facing impossible choices because of a global childcare crisis. Leave a baby alone to keep a job. Quit a job to keep a baby fed — and then not be able to feed her. Today, an estimated 350 million children are without access to the care they need.
Three hundred and fifty million. Karmel wrote the date down — March 16, 2017 — because she knew, the way mothers sometimes know things, that her life had just split into before and after.
What elephants do
What came to her wasn't a business plan. It was an image: a family of elephants on a savanna. When elephants sense one of their own is vulnerable — a calf, a laboring mother, an injured sister — the mothers don't scatter and they don't wait for rescue. They turn inward and form a circle, every calf protected at the center, every mother a wall.
No contracts. No corporation. Just mothers, circling up.
That, Karmel realized, was the answer hiding in plain sight. The world didn't need another childcare company. It needed mothers to do what mothers have always done — for each other's babies, not just their own.
Mom + omni
She named it Momni: Mom plus omni — Latin for all. All mothers. All children. The whole circle, with no one left outside it.
Momni 1.0: the first 26,000
What happened next still amazes her. From a kitchen table in Utah County, Momni grew to 26,000 mamas, with hosts in all 50 states. There was the Dr. Phil moment — Karmel on national television, explaining caresharing to a country that had never heard the word. There was the book: Circle Up, which became a #1 bestseller and put the elephant circle into thousands of mothers' hands.
And then, in 2020, the world closed its doors. A community built on opening your door to another mother's children could not, for a while, exist. Momni paused.
The chrysalis
Karmel never called it an ending. She called it the chrysalis — the quiet in-between where the thing that emerges is not the thing that went in. Through those years, the mamas kept writing to her. When is Momni coming back? Their pins never left the map. Neither did they.
Momni 2.0: no investors to serve. Only mothers.
Momni 2.0 is what came out of the chrysalis: organic, community-led, and mama-funded. No venture capital, no growth-at-all-costs, no boardroom deciding what's best for your family. The Circle is funded by tiny, honest contributions from the mamas themselves — a dollar here, a dollar there — which means Momni answers to exactly one constituency: mothers.
The first mamas are lighting their pins back up, one town at a time. The circle is forming again. You can read their letters — and mine — over in Stories.
About the elephant. The logo you see today is the original — unchanged since day one, and it always will be. Plenty of things about Momni have grown and shifted. The elephant doesn't, because she stands for the thing that doesn't change either: mothers circling up around each other's children. Some things you don't redraw.