Berkshire Community
Diaper Project: The Story
“I was 18 when I gave birth to my first son. It was the year that I experienced some of the worst economic hardships I’d ever known. After paying all my bills, I had about $35 a week left. I often went hungry. I was living in extreme poverty and doing my best to raise my son on my own. These times were humiliating. The stress I felt when it came time to buy diapers was overwhelming. And when you have a fast-growing baby, diaper sizes can change in a week. If you don’t have money to buy the right size, well, that’s just too bad.”
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The Mission
The Berkshire Community Diaper Project’s mission is to help parents in need by raising funds for diapers and wipes in order to provide these essentials for parents who struggle to afford them. Currently, BCDP distributes to 24 locations in Berkshire County. Since we began in 2014, we have reached increasing numbers of Berkshire families with diaper need and have now distributed over a 2.2 million diapers.
The Diaper Need
“Diaper need is a growing problem in our country,” according to the National Diaper Bank Network. “A clean diaper means a happy baby, but according to new data from the NDBN Diaper Check 2023: Diaper insecurity among U.S. Children and Families: 1 in 2 U.S. families cannot afford enough diapers to keep their infant or child clean, dry, and healthy.”
Lack of access to diapers has a profound effect on mother and child health, leading to increased problems with infection and illness in children, depression in mothers and interference with mother-child bonding in infancy.
The seriousness and intractable nature of diaper need is often drastically underestimated. Food stamps (SNAP) and Women, Infants and Children (WIC) funds cannot be used for diapers. There are no major public health funding efforts directed toward this problem and lack of access to diapers can affect whether a child can attend preschool, whether a parent can use childcare and how a new mother copes with raising an infant.
While each year the distribution of diapers locally has increased (with 2.1 million diapers distributed throughout Berkshire County since BCDP’s inception), lately the need has been unprecedented. In 2022, the BCDP distributed 21.9% more diapers than in 2021 and in 2023 distribution was up about 35% over 2022.
Written by Aaron M. Beatty, MA ARC