Donated diapers help keep bottoms happy

It’s no secret that babies go through a lot of diapers, and if your family has a low income, it can be tough to manage that expense.

That’s where diaper banks such as Happy Bottoms come into play. The nonprofit promoted National Diaper Need Awareness Week in September as a way to encourage people to donate money and time to the cause.

“You can’t buy diapers with food stamps,” said Liz Sutherlin, executive director of Happy Bottoms.

On a recent Wednesday, several volunteers from Belton Area Young Life were wrapping diapers in two side-by-side stacks of 25 bound together to make 50-diaper packs. Their organization distributes diapers from Happy Bottoms to teen moms.

“It’s nice knowing that not only are we receiving, but this is our chance to give back,” said volunteer Alexandria Smith.

Here’s how Happy Bottoms works: Diaper companies, such as Huggies, along with the national diaper bank donate diapers to local diaper banks. Those banks also take the national donations as well as local physical and monetary donations.

Then, the local bank, in this case Happy Bottoms, works with charitable agencies to distribute the diapers to families in need. Here, each charity knows its clients and puts in specific orders that correspond to the size of each child on their lists.

In Johnson County, those charities include the Johnson County Christmas Bureau and Jewish Family Services. Happy Bottoms is giving the bureau 37,500 diapers to distribute in its holiday store this year.

Altogether, there are 25 agencies connected with Happy Bottoms, and more are joining the list all the time.

Among all the agencies, Happy Bottoms ends up serving approximately 1,500 individual children each month. The agencies are spread throughout the metro area, in Johnson and Wyandotte counties on the Kansas side of the area and in Jackson, Clay, Platte, Cass and Lafayette counties in Missouri.

Volunteers often come from the agencies that patronize the diaper bank. Local businesses also bring in groups to wrap diapers as a team-building exercise, and individuals can participate, too.

Every child in need can get 50 diapers or 30 pull-ups per month. That won’t cover a family’s entire need, but it can give their budget a break.

When families can’t afford enough diapers, babies are often left too long in a soiled one to make the supply last longer, Sutherlin said.

To make sure the diapers go to the people who need them most, workers and volunteers at the diaper bank repackage the diapers from their original wrappings into shrink-wrapped stacks of 50. This prevents anyone from picking up the monthly allotment and returning it to a store for cash.

“These diapers are going on babies’ butts,” said Tess Koppelman, communications chairwoman for Happy Bottoms.

Funding for the diaper bank comes from donations, as well as grants from organizations such as Impact KC and Hallmark.

The problem with diaper donations is that they don’t always come in the sizes people need the most.

Happy Bottoms recently received a donation of 400,000 size one diapers, but babies needing that size through various agencies account for only about 6 percent of the 1 million diapers Happy Bottoms will distribute in a year. Sizes four and five make up about 48 percent of the demand.

By the time these families figure out how to connect with an agency, the babies are often in the bigger sizes already.

In this case, Happy Bottoms came up with a solution. They’re planning to partner with area hospitals to send packages of these diapers home with low-income families when the families leave the maternity ward.

Overall, Sutherlin said the best thing individuals can do to support the diaper bank is to volunteer or give monetary donations, since they can buy diapers wholesale much cheaper than the average consumer can.

This story was originally published September 23, 2014 at 7:13 PM with the headline "Donated diapers help keep bottoms happy."