by BLACK ENTERPRISE Editors
A quarter of families miss work as a result, often because they don’t have enough diapers to send with their children to child care.
In America, diapers have long been treated as a luxury good rather than a necessity.
Half of families with young kids struggle to afford all the diapers they need. A quarter of families miss work as a result, often because they don’t have enough diapers to send with their children to child care.
It’s a largely invisible issue with enormous consequences for the health of parents and children. Studies have found that diaper need is a greater contributor to postpartum depression than food insecurity and housing instability. And when parents don’t have enough diapers, they make do with sanitary pads, rags or other materials. Some report having to leave their children in soiled diapers for extended periods, raising the risk for urinary tract infections and diaper rash.
So Amy Kadens, who has worked in the diaper space for nearly 15 years, wondered: What if diapers were free for the parents who need them most? For decades, the United States has not had a good answer. So she came up with her own The 19th reports.
Federal assistance programs that help low-income families, such as food stamps and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), have never allowed families to use those funds to purchase diapers.
“Diaper banks are doing heroic work with very little. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel,” Kadens said. But, “I wanted to continue to sink my teeth into this.”
So Kadens started to work on a solution that could give people the funds to get whatever diapers they needed, without the warehouses to store donations or the teams to get those donations out.
The idea, Kadens said, was to make it as simple as possible, while also giving parents the ability to choose what brands they preferred.
“Families have brand loyalty,” Kadens said. “I wanted to keep dignity and choice at the forefront of everything we did.”
The Diaper Dollars team went through months of market research to refine the tech to work well for participants. They didn’t want coupons because there was too much fraud in the system, and gift cards meant users could be limited on where to shop.
To find participants, Diaper Dollars partners with organizations such as WIC clinics and local hospitals to refer people to the program, which is funded from a mix of philanthropy and financial support from those same partners. Partners establish the eligibility criteria, how long participants can be a part of the program, and whether the stipend will be higher for those with multiple babies.
So when Illinois launched a birth equity initiative to address the needs of postpartum parents, from a home visiting program to better diaper access, it chose to partner with Diaper Dollars.
“Giving someone a card where they can go to the store of their choice, decide what’s best, that is what’s part of dignity,” Stratton said. “Every woman deserves to bring life into this world safely and with dignity.”
Brendan Kitt, Diaper Dollars’ program director, said the program was able to offer an operational solution to a problem the state wanted to address but didn’t have a mechanism for. The system works similarly to a universal basic income, where people in need are given a cash stipend, but it’s more targeted.
“Both for funders and supporters, it’s always a question when you talk to people about where the money goes,” he said. “The fact that we can limit the transactions to the specific needs that we’re trying to serve, I think, is one of the biggest things that legitimized our operation over just giving basic cash assistance.”
Parents who benefited from Diaper Dollars told the organization in testimonials that they’ve had to turn to using underwear or old T-shirts when they didn’t have the money for diapers, often making decisions between paying for rent or diapers.
After going through the program, parents reported that the funds gave them the wiggle room to buy their children other essentials or to make them better meals.
“The need is really so big, and it’s not going to be addressed through just one sort of answer or one type of program,” Samuel Goldblum said. “It’s really important to have ways to reach people in all sorts of different communities.”
Kadens’ dream is to take the program to every state. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned and some red states instituted abortion bans, conservative lawmakers have been looking for ways to support postpartum parents.
Samuel Goldblum said the National Diaper Bank Network has seen more bipartisan support for addressing diaper needs this year “than we’ve ever seen before.”
It should be that simple, Kadens said: “It doesn’t matter if you’re blue or red. Babies need diapers.”
This story was produced by The 19th and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
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Source: Black Enterprise
