Two moms. One idea.

A young child stands beside a blue donation bin filled with care items at a Help a Mother Out Mother's Day donation drive collection site.

In 2009, Lisa Truong saw an Oprah segment about a middle-class family that had lost their jobs, then their home. They were living in a shelter with their young children. The story stuck with her, and she and her friend, Rachel Fudge set out to find a way to lend a hand. 

When they reached out to family service agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area, they learned the most urgent need was not clothing, blankets, or food. It was diapers. Federal safety-net programs like WIC and SNAP don’t cover diapers, and families in shelters and crisis routinely go without. 

Lisa and Rachel, both new mothers at the time, organized a Mother’s Day diaper drive. Through social networks, mom blogs, parenting stores, and play spaces, they collected more than 15,000 diapers in a single month, and recognized they’d found something much bigger than a one-time campaign.

From a drive to an organization

Help a Mother Out team members and volunteers, including young children, hold the organization's banner in a warehouse stacked with boxes of donated diapers.

The Mother’s Day drive inspired a hypothesis: Diaper need was not a one-time crisis, but a structural gap in California’s safety net. Lisa and Rachel started small, partnering with local family service agencies to get diapers to the families who needed them most. The Help a Mother Out model proved successful. By 2012, HAMO had distributed its first million diapers through community partners across the Bay Area. 

Those early years established HAMO’s signature approach – working hand-in-hand with family service agencies, medical clinics, and public health programs already serving low-income families, so diapers reach those families where they already turn for help.

Building an institutional model

Help a Mother Out staff in safety vests run a large diaper distribution at a clinic site, with pallets of boxed diapers staged across the parking lot.

In 2015, HAMO partnered with the San Francisco Human Services Agency to launch the SF Diaper Bank, the first publicly funded diaper bank in the United States. The model proved a public-private partnership could deliver basic family essentials at scale, efficiently and accountably. It became a proof of concept of what government investment in diaper need could look like. 

In 2019, California recognized how effective that model could be. The state established its first dedicated funding for diaper banks, and HAMO became one of the lead partners delivering on that commitment. 

Today, HAMO is a charter member of the National Diaper Bank Network and an active member of the California Association of Diaper Banks, organizations that set the standards and shape policy that governs the field nationally and statewide. By 2023, HAMO had distributed more than 60 million diapers through its partner network. In 2026, the organization passed the 80 million diaper mark.

Today, and what’s to come

A woman sits in the back of a cargo van loaded with stacked boxes of diapers staged for community distribution.

HAMO now works with more than 60 community diaper distribution partners across the Bay Area, including medical clinics, family resource centers, public health and social service agencies, shelters, and emergency food pantries. Government contracts, foundation grants, and individual donors fund a model built for scale and stewarded thoughtfully. In more than a decade of administering public dollars, HAMO has accounted for every diaper and every dollar. 

Lisa continues to serve as HAMO’s founding executive director, alongside a team and community of board members, advisors, donors, and volunteers who have stayed with this work because it matters. 

What started as two friends’ Mother’s Day drive has helped shape how California’s safety net responds to diaper need. We’re proud of what we’ve built, and clear-eyed about the work still to come. Across California and the country, diaper need is still an everyday reality for too many families. In HAMO’s next chapter, we will deepen partnerships, extend what we’ve shown works, and demonstrate what’s possible when communities, government, and a committed network of supporters decide no family should have to choose between diapers and dinner.

Let’s talk about what’s next.