Staff members began noticing mothers standing outside WalMart and Target asking not for food, but for packages of diapers for their children. We knew the recession was hitting Solano families hard, but we had no idea just how bad things were until we began digging a little deeper.

We had an incredible community event on Wednesday June 30th, which we put together to celebrate our Every Little Bottom donation from Huggies.
Pictured above is one of our youngest volunteers handing out diapers to Mel …

We had a great result from our Seattle area diaper drive events – we collected about 10,000 diapers to benefit WestSide Baby in West Seattle and Eastside Baby Corner in Issaquah. We approached the diaper drive with a true grassroots communication on “How You Can Help” with information on how to host a diaper drive. My goal here was to get all my friends (and their friends) to reach out to their schools, community organizations, and businesses to collect diapers.

Yesterday I met with a 38 year old mother of a 4 month old baby. She was staying with friends and just became homeless because they received an eviction notice. She didn’t have anywhere to go with her baby when she came to HPP and only had a diaper bag full of things for the baby.

Nina and friends told me story about a mom that usually comes to them on Mondays. She has a young child, as well as a 6 month old baby boy. Because she believes that larger sized diapers hold more, and therefore, are cheaper in cost, she puts the baby boy in size 5, even though he really fits a size 3. The baby is six months old and is still wearing newborn clothes, because the mothers doesn’t have bigger clothes for him to wear. So his clothes are too tight, and he stays in the Size 5 diaper longer than he probably should.

“…with every face, every new name, every threadbare, sweat-stained T-shirt or matted head of hair, I feel a mixture of pity and disgust, and I am ashamed of myself.”