Boundless Love Drove this New Mom to Start a Grassroots Diaper Bank

Lisa Truong was a new mom at home with her baby at the height of the Great Recession, when an Oprah segment caught her eye. It was a piece highlighting California families who’d fallen on hard times. 

Truong’s heart went out to them: Financial crisis aside, new parents have more than enough on their plates as it is, as she very well knew. She resolved to take action and floated the idea of a community service project for Mother’s Day at a rare mom’s night out, a sushi dinner with friend and fellow mom Rachel Fudge. 

The pair agreed to pull together a donation drive to support families struggling through economic hardship. Their research, though, led them away from clothing and baby gear – and toward the less popular items to donate for which need was greater. They learned that people rarely donate diapers, and that diapers are – amazingly – not included in public assistance programs like food stamps and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC. 

“We were shocked,” Truong says. “We were shocked as moms of children in diapers that they were forgotten and overlooked.” 

After the shock came another emotion. 

“Then we got really mad, and decided we needed to build this organization.” 

Help a Mother Out (“HAMO”) focuses on immediate needs and systems change. First, Truong says, “we get as many diapers as possible to families in need. Then, second, we advocate for diapers to be included in the social safety net.” Thus, Help a Mother Out was born. 

Help a Mother Out crowdsourced 15,000 diapers from parent listservs, mommy blogs, social networks, and friends – pure grassroots – all in its first month of existence in 2009. And their next goal, just six years later in 2015, came to the fore when the organization established the San Francisco Diaper Bank, the first public diaper assistance program in the United States, in partnership with the city’s human services agency. Today, across all programs, HAMO serves over 6,000 families with diaper-age kids every month. A recent independent evaluation of their programs found that 98% of respondents feel happier and healthier after receiving a consistent supply of diapers for their baby.

Help a Mother Out hopes to continue expanding its programming within the region and beyond. “Diapers are a really small thing, but they can have a really big impact in the life of a baby and a family,” Truong says. Not just physical well-being, but social-emotional and mental health also hang in the balance, for both parent and baby. “Having diapers for your baby can be the difference that makes someone feel like they are doing a good job as a parent.”