Diapers. Vital for a newborn’s health, but a significant cost for their parents. Without clean diapers, working parents can’t send their children to daycare, meaning lost hours, lost wages, and lost jobs. Something as small as a diaper need can destabilize families – and 44% of children in Indiana live close enough to the poverty line that this can be a real risk. Our mission to provide help for today and hope for tomorrow begins when a child takes their first breath.
We augment our diapers by adding educational resources from organizations like Too Small To Fail to help parents be their children’s first teacher.
“We pass out diapers to families going to appointments and getting vaccines on time, and this helped us see that the 1-Month visit was the most missed. We did some work around that and attendance is up 14%. If it wasn’t for the connection with Second Harvest we wouldn’t have had that information.” – IU Health representative from the Healthy Beginnings Program
Second Harvest became a member of the National Diaper Bank Network in 2020 so that we could better help new families. Since then we have more than doubled our diaper impact, from 247,000 diapers in 2020 to 530,000 diapers last year. That the community has embraced our efforts shows the reality of the need and the possibility of making changes.