There is one organization providing such support here, Ammehjelpen
(www.ammehjelpen.no) which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.
I've been a member and a peer supporter since we moved here 24 years ago.
It's mostly phone support, there are no meetings except for the members of
the local groups, to discuss calls they've had since the last meeting and to
learn from one another.  To be a mother to mother helper one has to have
breastfed, and one has to take a farily simple written test and pass it.
Low threshhold, in other words.  The intention has always been to keep it as
open and informal as humanly possible.  Mothers who need help may phone or
e-mail us.  They are not charged and they don't have to reveal their
identities.  
It's possible to be a member without being a peer supporter, but not the
other way around.  All members, supporters or not, pay annual dues which go
to running the organization.  It also gets a small amount of government
support, and it takes money from advertisers on the website as you will see
if you visit it.  The policy is not to accept adverts from code violators.
Some of us would prefer to see no advertising at all, but alas we do not
prevail at the moment.

The professional help available to mothers with breastfeeding problems is
also provided at no charge to the mothers, through the well child care
system, but the quality of help is variable, from excellent to dreadful.
Peer support varies from excellent to adequate, in my very biased opinion.
At least all the peer supporters care about breastfeeding which is more than
one can say for staff in the maternal child health system here.

At present there are about 200 peer supporters, offering support to the
nearly sixty thousand mothers who give birth in Norway each year.  Luckily
we have such a strong breastfeeding culture and reasonably good practice in
maternity institutions that we actually squeak by fairly well even with such
minimal coverage.  About half of the dozen IBCLCs in Norway are also peer
supporters, and I think all of us are still active in that capacity.  The
head of the national center for breastfeeding is a nutritionist who started
out as a peer supporter herself, and she is still a member of the
organization but I don't think she is still acting as a peer supporter.
Most of the external assessors for Baby-Friendly here were recruited from
Ammehjelpen, who had a registry of which peer supporters were health care
personnel.  

The most exciting thing my local group has done in recent times was host a
meeting at the hospital, for interested staff and for us and anyone else we
could think of to invite, where Karleen Gribble addressed us about adoptive
breastfeeding.  She brought down the house when she showed a photo from the
national meeting of the Australian Breastfeeding Association, which filled a
gigantic venue.  We can hold our national meetings in classrooms if we have
to.   

Cheers
Rachel Myr
Ammehjelper, going for Lactosaurus designation next year, Kristiansand,
Norway 

 "I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that
whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the
terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath
everything. Otherwise it is false."  --Ernest Becker

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