Moms Helping Moms Interview
In much of the United States, diapers are considered a luxury item and receive similar tax rates than a pack of cigarettes or alcohol. Studies show that the average American family runs 19 diapers short every month.
Moms Helping Moms supplies struggling families with diapers and hygiene products for their newborn babies.
Find out how you can assist families in need of extra support in your own communities by establishing your own baby item donation network.
Listen here or find us on your favorite podcast app.
December 6, 2020
How Donating Unused Diapers Can Reduce Generational Stress
How Donating Unused Diapers Can Reduce Generational Stress
The cost of diapers for newborn babies can total $1,000 per year, and government programs assisting with the costs associated with starting a family simply do not exist. If a family cannot afford enough diapers for their child, this creates a stressful situation - stress that can be passed onto a child. In this episode we spoke with Megan Deaton from Moms Helping Moms about the difficulties many families face in covering the costs associated with raising a baby.
Diapers are taxed as a luxury item in many places across the United States
Diapers are one of the most important tools in keeping a baby healthy and safe throughout its development. Just as food banks operate to relieve the burdens of food insecurity, diaper banks operate in a similar way for families unable to meet the growing price of diapers. Megan Deaton explains that one in every three households in the United States is regularly forced to choose between purchasing food or purchasing diapers, which is exactly what Moms for Moms is hoping to change.
Listen to the whole interview to find out how you can help families focus more on raising their children and less on the cost of diapers. You can also read about hosting your own diaper drive, as well as become informed about upcoming events. Many parents expressed feelings of gratitude for the solidarity shown by their own communities.
Want to learn more about Moms Helping Moms? You can checkout their news section, get in touch via email and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.
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Every day you and I get bombarded with negative news. And just like our bodies, become what we eat, our minds become the information that we consume. If you want to stay positive, it’s so important that you also listen to stories that inspire you and uplift you. In this podcast we interview leading experts dedicated to solving the world’s most pressing problems. And if you stick around, I promise you will not only be as informed as if you watched the news, you will be uplifted, inspired, and have more positive energy in your life. Welcome to Great.com Talks With.
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Hi and welcome. Today Great.com talks with Megan Deaton, who is the deputy director and a board member of Mom Helping Moms Foundation.org, and if you haven’t heard of them before, they are a New Jersey based baby supply and diaper bank. And if you haven’t done so already, you definitely want to press subscribe, because today we’re going to explore what are the needs for moms in the US and how are they helping each other. Megan, so nice to have you on. Thank you for taking the time. I was yelling into the mic there, oh! Take it easy. So how would you describe your organization to someone that might not be familiar with what you do or even the problems you’re facing?
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Sure. So moms helping moms is a baby supply and diaper bank. We operate very much like a food bank, but for diapers. So diaper need is described as the lack of a sufficient supply of diapers to keep babies dry and safe and healthy. So they say that one in three households in the United States has to choose between purchasing food or purchasing diapers, which is a huge problem. There’s lots of studies that show how important having a dry diaper is both on the child themselves and on the caregivers and their stress. So moms helping moms started about 10 years ago. Our founder, Bridget Cutler, had just had a baby. She read an article in a magazine about a woman who had to give her baby up for adoption because she couldn’t afford to care for her. She couldn’t afford the basic need and she wanted a better life for her baby. And that really spoke to Bridget. And she just thought, how can I, you know, make that not happen for another family, another mom? That would be the hardest position. I couldn’t imagine being in it.
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So she started reaching out to friends and neighbors around town where we lived at the time and asked if they had any diapers or other baby gear to pass on.
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And she found people in the town that we were in who needed it and just started kind of collecting gear and inviting families to her garage once a month to come pick up, pick out whatever they needed for free. At the same time, I had just had twins. I had a six month-old twins when I met Bridget and I had a lot of baby stuff laying around. So I had two babies and I couldn’t find a place to donate it. And at the same time, I found being a new parent to be very overwhelming. Caring for a baby is hard and there’s no instruction booklet on how to do it. And it’s also expensive. Diapers are expensive. Formula is expensive, clothing, all the gear. And I literally would lay awake in bed at night and just wonder how I would do this if I didn’t have my support system, my husband, my parents, my friends, my family. And it really just struck a chord with me. And I wanted to help other families. I wanted to. See what I could do to take that stress off of another mom and I found Bridget. You know, she reached out to our community to collect stuff and I had stuff and she showed up at my door to pick it up. And I offered to help her. And that’s how we met. And here I am 10 years later. As we got going, we sort of realized how big the need was. We didn’t realize that diaper need was a thing. We didn’t know the diaper banks were a thing. We hooked up with a couple of other moms who kind of helped us get it started. And it started just in the town that we were in and it grew from there.
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And now we’re statewide in New Jersey and it just keeps growing. Last year we gave out two hundred and seventy
thousand diapers, and just this past month we gave out our 500,000th diaper for this year. So we’ve already doubled what we did last year. And I don’t see that stopping anytime soon because of the pandemic.
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Well, you know, before researching what you guys do, I never thought of what big of a burden it must be for a parent that is already struggling to make ends meet. I read on your website that it costs 18 dollars per week, which adds up to a thousand dollars per year. So I can totally understand how someone might have to make the choice between diapers and food so that you’re willing to take some of that pressure off. I think it’s really great. And you mentioned you took stuff from your garage and you donated it to other moms in need. So how is that working then with the diapers? I can imagine there are harder to recycle. Where are they coming from? Is it from private donors? Is it from a government? How does it work?
[00:05:53]
Yeah, that’s a great question. So it’s all from private donors right now. We actually take so we deal only in disposable diapers. We don’t do cloth diapers because a lot of our families don’t have the means to clean them. They either don’t have washing machines in their houses. They don’t have access to a cleaning service. And also, one important point that we’ve learned through all of this is that in order to send your child to daycare, you often have to have a two week supply of disposable diapers. They’ll only take disposable ones. If you don’t have that, you can’t send your child to daycare. And if you can’t send your child to daycare, you cannot go to work and provide for your family. So it’s a crazy cycle. So we deal with disposable diapers, we take new diapers, and we also take open packs of diapers and we repackage them. So a lot of times a new parent will open a pack of diapers, they’ll use a couple of them, and then the next day their kid has miraculously grown out of them to the next size. And so people find themselves with plenty of loose diapers, open packages of diapers, and instead of throwing them out, we’ll take them. We’ll repackage them and distribute them to the families.
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That’s a real useful service, and it seems like both that and reusing the toys is very much in line with being nurturing towards the environment as well. So with the work that you do then and you have become statewide in New Jersey, you do see this as a trend that is spreading maybe to other places in the states or maybe even globally.
[00:07:35]
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s definitely an issue all around the world. And one of the things that we’ve also learned over this is that diapers are not covered, at least in the United States. Diapers are not covered by governmental programs. So you can’t take your food stamps and go to the grocery store and buy diapers with them. But also, you shouldn’t have to write food stamps to purchase nutritious food. So that’s a big hurdle that everybody comes across. And then in the pandemic, we’ve seen a huge growth in the need. There’s a lot of families that we’re not in a poverty situation before a lot of middle class families are finding themselves out of work and suddenly in need. And that that’s something that we’re coming across all across the state of New Jersey.
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We’re also in several networks in a couple of networks of that type of banks across the country. And everybody kind of across the board, across the entire United States is finding the same thing. I mean, the distribution numbers of diapers across all the diaper banks is skyrocketing.
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And we are struggling to keep up with the supply to meet the demand. So our diapers all come from private donors, households, and then people will host community diaper drives for us in churches and schools, in their offices or their company wide diaper drives.
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And then we get some donations from some larger organizations. We work with an organization out in California called Baby the Baby. And a lot of times the honest company will donate diapers to us through them. We work with the National Diaper Bank Network here in the United States and they are founded by Huggies. So sometimes we can get diapers donated from Huggies as well. And diapers are also the only item that we purchase that we have a budget to purchase. But usually we only have to purchase about one percent of our diapers in a year this year because our numbers have doubled so far that that has greatly increased. So we purchase them with donations from private donors and some grant funding.
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Right. And what kind of challenges are you seeing except for the expanded need, is there?
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I don’t know if this is true, but I can imagine it being tricky knowing. How to set up a system so the diapers go to the families in need and the system is not being abused, if that makes sense, since they’re quite expensive.
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They are expensive. We do not distribute directly to the families. We distribute through other non-profit organizations, churches, schools, social service organizations, welfare organizations, other different varying social
service type organizations. They work directly with the families. And so they kind of get the families for us and that gives us the chance to support them in their efforts. Oftentimes they’ll provide other services as well.
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You know, maybe they’re helping a homeless family get back on their feet or they’re providing educational services to them and the diapers are part of their program. So in that sense, you know, we also look at as. We are not; we don’t see ourselves as someone’s main source of diapers. The studies show that the average family falls short, about 19 diapers per month. And so we are looking just to supplement. We don’t want people to fully depend on us for diapers because we can’t meet that need, but we can supplement and help them out in that regard. So, you know, they may there’s a chance that families do get diapers from a couple of different sources in a month, but for the most part, we don’t see that as being a huge issue.
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I see, and.
[00:11:44]
If you look ahead then and if you had a vision for. How circumstances could change for moms when they’re having babies. What changes would you like to see be implemented in the U.S.?
[00:12:04]
Well, a lot of states are looking to have sales tax removed on diapers, diapers are taxed as a luxury item in a lot of places. So it’s right up there with cigarettes and alcohol. So there’s a lot of advocacy efforts to get that removed in New Jersey. They’re currently not taxed. So that’s a good thing. But it doesn’t happen like that in all 50 states and other government support would be nice.
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We’ve been advocating for the National Diaper Network to get some government funding in place to help with diapers and child care services. And we’ve been working with them a little bit on that.
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So I think.
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What we can do right now is to bring awareness to the issue, as you said earlier, that a lot of people are aware that this is even a problem.
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A lot of people we talked to were like, oh, you know, people don’t think the diapers are an issue until you explain it to them or if they know somebody who was in that situation. So right now, our main goal is to bring awareness to the issue, to get the community and the government to help support the efforts.
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I see, and.
[00:13:14]
Looking beyond the changes for the country at large, what are the goals for mom helping moms? What would you like to accomplish in the next, let’s say, 10 years?
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We really have been working to make sure that the entire state of New Jersey, everyone in the state of New Jersey, has a resource for diapers.
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We have grown now that we have a partner in every county in the state of New Jersey, but we’re still only making a dent this year.
[00:13:51]
We’re on track to get about 600,000 diapers and to sixty two organizations around the state to help their families. But that is just a small piece of the puzzle in our state, and we’ve been working a little bit with other organizations around the state that also distribute diapers. And what we would like to do is to make sure that everybody has access to a resource like moms helping moms so that no baby ever does not have access to a dry diaper. I don’t ever want a parent or a caregiver to wonder where their next diaper is coming from because.
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The effects on the parents themselves is too much, it increases their stress. Which just increases the stress on the whole family, including the baby.
[00:14:47]
Yeah, if that could be avoided, it would be yeah, that would bring me a warm feeling.
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It is a simple thing like yeah, it’s a simple thing that is a problem that we see can easily be helped with a little bit of effort.
[00:15:08]
And I appreciate you guys doing the efforts to start this moment and create some kind of change. And you mentioned previously. Awareness, so imagine someone listening to this and saying, hey, I wish more people knew about this problem or maybe even like me, I didn’t know so much about this problem.
[00:15:29]
I wish more people knew about this problem. What can they do both to stay informed and up to date, but also, like from your point of view, what can they do to spread this awareness?
[00:15:42]
One of the best things that people in the community can do to spread awareness is to host a diaper drive. If you put a box out in front of the school or the church or the YMCA, people see the box and they see that you’re collecting diapers and wipes and baby hygiene items. And it just kind of puts a little light on in their head like, oh, people are collecting that. That’s a need. That’s something that we can do to help out members of our own community, you know? So it’s just it’s a very simple way to engage the community and and bring the awareness out there.
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And I can imagine the positive spin ups, spin offs of that community building aspect of taking action in that way, I can’t imagine that is bringing people together. And would your organization do what someone can do to help you out and to stay up to date with the work that you’re doing?
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Follow us on social media. We try to post facts, volunteer with us. That’s a huge one right now.
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We have had to postpone our volunteer sessions because of the pandemic, but we’re hoping in the new year that we’ll bring people back and we really rely on volunteers to help us in our warehouse, get the donations kind of turned around and back out to the families. Check out our website. We try to keep it updated on facts about diapers that need advocacy in the government. Stuff like that.
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Beautiful Megan Deaton, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with great.com today. It was a pleasure. And for you listening to this, if you enjoy this conversation and if you would like to spread more awareness about anything from diaper needs to how to help the climate to any other charity causes that we talk about in this podcast, please consider hitting subscribe in your podcast app or YouTube. They will help us get through the algorithms and reach more people with these kinds of messages. I appreciate that you listen to this and we’ll see you in the next episode.
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