It is 16 February 2015 and 100 Australians will go missing today.

100 People will go missing in Australia today, and tomorrow there’ll be 100 more.

100 Australians disappear every day, and there are at least 100 reasons for it. For every hundred, 85 will be located within a week. But roughly 15 people will disappear today who will remain missing for some time… some of them forever.

There was a day in the early 1970s when my husband’s uncle Billy became one of the missing. He’d kept his distance for several years, checking in with a phone call every Christmas day, until one Christmas came and went without a word from Billy. He’s never been seen or heard of again.

I must admit that I failed to really connect emotionally with Billy’s story, in that way you do when something happened a long time ago, and you’re imagining it rather than remembering and feeling it. It was a classic “olden days” yarn in my mind, about how tough and chaotic life used to be.

It still lives in brilliant technicolor for my mother-in-law, Billy’s sister who wonders to this day how he could hide from her for so long, but it’s not discussed very often anymore. It’s definitely dropped of the list of hot topics at family functions. It just is what it is, and people have long since tired of theorising and suggesting places to search.

A similar story… Dan was just 24 years old when he disappeared.

I was sitting in my car one morning a couple of years ago, waiting for the lights to change when I saw the striking face of a young man smiling at me from a very home-made poster stuck to a light poll. The headline said “Dan Come Home” and in the moment I assumed it was a guerilla marketing campaign for a band or a play because the guy looked far too handsome and happy to really be missing.

I googled it as soon as I got home and entered the world of the O’Keeffe family, Dan’s family. They’re a pretty unassuming bunch, a “normal” family from Geelong who’ve searched for Dan since that fateful day in 2011, when he rose early, chatted normally with his Dad, and then slipped out the back door. He is yet to return.

Read more here: Missing since July last year: “A letter to my brother Dan”

I guess I assumed that these days life in Australia is so organised and sanitised, so technologically secure that it’d be pretty difficult to drop off the radar, and that if someone did the police would scour the globe to find them, checking in daily with the worried family at home.

The truth is that police resources are hard to hold onto as time moves on and it becomes unlikely that a crime has been committed – choosing to walk away from your life isn’t a crime, after all. In reality, the search belongs to the family, and who the hell knows how to conduct a missing persons search?

Well Dan’s sister Loren does (now). Unfortunately she’s been doing it for years and she’s developed some very useful tools to help families through every stage of searching for a loved one. She’s started her own not-for-profit organisation called MPAN, which stands for Missing Persons Advocacy Network, and through it she shares resources and advice with those searching for missing persons.

As she’s made her way through the last couple of years, gathering this weird skillset, one objective has remained the same – to get as many people as possible to see Dan’s face and know his story. She believes that one day, someone will see a poster, or a sticker, or a television interview and recognise Dan as a man they know in their community. That objective has lead to the development of “Help Find Me” which turns Australia into one big search engine for missing people. MPAN is featuring 50 long term missing Australians for the campaign, hoping to reunite families, get answers, or just a week-long injection of hope. Because hope is immeasurable to families like these.

“Help Find Me” enables all of us, from web developers, to business owners to casual social media users to connect with the reality of missing people, and with one Australian going missing every 15 minutes, it is all of our reality.

To find out more about MPAN or to make a donation, visit their website.