Loving Bottoms prepared for run on diaper bank
Toilet paper isn’t only thing missing from store shelves as parents scramble for diapers, wipes, formula
Loving Bottoms founder and Executive Director Lee Ann Porter stands in one of the diaper bank’s storerooms in a photo taken in 2018. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox
Lee Ann Porter’s almost entire family is on the front lines in the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’re kind of that family that isn’t experiencing typical shelter-in-place,” she said Thursday from her home in Galesburg. “My husband drives a semi, I still have to go over to the diaper bank, and my 16-year-old works at a grocery store.”
A grocery store, it’s worth noting, where it’s not just toilet paper in short supply. As The New York Times reported last week, parents of newborns and toddlers find themselves increasingly scrambling for diapers, wipes, and baby formula.
Galesburg is in Knox County, which has seen just one confirmed case of COVID-19 according to the latest data from the Illinois Department of Public Health. But it’s of course still subject to the statewide stay-at-home order imposed by Gov. Pritzker to halt the spread of the virus, and it’s seen the same sort of grocery-store hoarding as everyone everywhere has experienced.
“Things seem to trickle down to us a little bit later,” said Porter, who’s been monitoring the situation as founder and executive director of the Loving Bottoms diaper bank, a nonprofit serving eight counties in west-central Illinois along with local partner agencies. “We have experienced the typical things the rest of the country has, where you couldn’t get toilet paper, paper towels, things like that. Those things are still pretty slow to be on the shelves. Bread was definitely hard to get there for a little bit.”
And diapers and wipes, she added. And, while Loving Bottoms doesn’t deal in baby formula, Porter said she has seen an increasing number of people asking if it does — a sign of those in need reaching out for essentials.
“The diapers have been affected to some degree at different times,” Porter said. “The wipes I’ve heard are sometimes hard to get.
“They’re getting restocked, but not necessarily the brand you normally use, which for lower-income people is a little bit harder. If you’re buying the more affordable diaper, now you’re buying the more expensive diaper. The cost of diapers is going up at the same time your income is maybe going down.”
She recounted asking a woman scouring a diaper aisle for products if she could help her find anything, and the woman said, “I think the only size 6’s here are Pampers, and we just don’t normally pay that much on our diapers, but I guess we don’t have a choice this week. We have to have them, it’s the only brand left.”
Consider also that, even when diapers are in stock, many can’t afford to buy in bulk. “Those living paycheck to paycheck can’t stock up on megapackages of TP or diapers,” Porter said. “You’re buying just enough diapers to get through the week, because that’s all you can afford.”
“Those living paycheck to paycheck can’t stock up on megapackages of TP or diapers,” says Lee Ann Porter of the Loving Bottoms diaper bank. “You’re buying just enough diapers to get through the week, because that’s all you can afford.” (Lee Ann Porter)
Even in the best of times, those are people Loving Bottoms was created to serve. It grew out of Porter’s own experience struggling to provide her children with basic needs after her first husband abandoned the family. Remarried and back on her feet, she launched Loving Bottoms five years ago, and since then it has distributed 470,000 diapers, 57,000 just this year.
Porter estimated that, even before the coronavirus downturn, a third of families in the eight-county region were struggling to make ends meet, and “that is just amplified now.”
According to Porter, they’ve usually been distributing about 18- or 19,000 diapers a month, but they’ve already seen an increase as a result of the economic slowdown stemming from the coronavirus crisis. They distributed 22,000 in March and expect to do 25,000 this month.
That is, if they can keep the supply chain rolling, because a diaper bank is subject to the same short of shortages as supermarkets when it comes to restocking.
“It’s a little bit wonky. Things are trickling in,” Porter said. She usually tries to arrange deliveries together, and of course she’s been trying to stay home as much as anyone else in recent days, but she’s found herself having to go to the warehouse on an almost daily basis to accept deliveries from FedEx as they arrive. The stay-at-home order, at the same time, has limited the smaller drop-off donations they usually receive from locals.
“So at a time when we’re trying to piecemeal this together, our drop-off locations that people usually drop off donations to are all closed,” Porter said. “The typical diaper drives can’t be happening. So it’s a time when we’re seeing decreased incoming, but we’re receiving an increase in what we have to put out.”
Thus, on the Loving Bottoms’ website for ways to give, they’re relying more on direct cash donations, enabling them to buy diapers from various suppliers. They’re also hoping for a little help from the Illinois COVID-19 Response Fund for nonprofits launched last month by the Pritzkers.
Don’t forget, however, they then have to repackage those diapers for individual pickups and distribution to partner agencies, and that too presents a problem under the need for social distancing. A volunteer night scheduled for Monday at the warehouse has of course been put off.
“We have had to cancel all of our incoming volunteer groups,” Porter said. “Which creates another strain, because we’ve got to get all the products ready on our own, and we’re one staff.”
She credited her “wonderful” board of directors with helping to fill the gap, as well a few key volunteers, saying, “We’re trying to limit the number of people in. Even I don’t go to the warehouse except when I have to.
“We’re sanitizing everything when we come in, when we leave,” she added. “We’ve got hand sanitizer. Everybody’s washing their hands.”
And, as an extra precaution, they’re leaving the repackaged diapers to sit in the warehouse for an extra week — beyond the time the coronavirus is said to be able to remain on its own — before they’re passed out to families and the diaper bank’s companion agencies distributing them throughout the region. “We just want to make sure that what we’re putting out to our partners is safe,” Porter said.
There’s a growing recognition that this is the way we all have to live and what we have to find a way to deal with as the virus spreads and runs its course.
“People are starting to take it more seriously and staying in place,” Porter said, even in relatively untouched areas like Galesburg. “There’s been really cool stuff with the community coming together.”
She pointed to how a local restaurant, Lieber’s Boxcar Express, has joined local nonprofits in a program to distribute 5,000 sandwiches to local residents. Porter and her neighbors, meanwhile, maintain a blessing box where people can both leave and pick up food.
“It’s just been cool to see the community pull together,” she said, “in a time when they also have to be apart.”
Enjoy an earlier One Illinois video on Lee Ann Porter and Loving Bottoms.