ATLANTA — A Grant Park mother helping single moms in need this holiday season. Mary Corder Harrell started her Holiday Diaper Drive in 2020 with her mother.
“I became a mom four years ago, and very quickly realized that babies fly through diapers, and they are quite expensive,” Harrell said.
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The Atlanta realtor told Channel 2′s Eryn Rogers she wanted to help others feeling strained by the cost.
The amount of money it takes to keep your baby clean and dry is a lot more money than it should be, so to ease that burden feels really significant,” Harrell said.
She teamed up with East Point non-profit, Tender, which was also founded four years ago by Jaycina Almond.
“We initially started doing emergency bill pay assistance, and then, Covid hit,” Almond said.
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That’s when the organization started delivering diapers, and it’s grown from there. They now provide 60 to 80 families a month with free diapers, formula, and wipes. Almond said families typically spend around $1000 a month on diapers.
“If you look at poor, working-class families, that’s 14% of their income going strictly to just diapers, and so that’s eating up a big chunk of something,” Almond said. “When you still have daycare costs, you have food costs, housing costs, utilities costs, and all those things add up, so by just taking that one little thing off of a family’s plate, you’re creating a domino effect.”
She said drives like Harrell’s have a significant impact.
“Actually, from Mary’s drive, we never have had to buy size one, two or threes for a full year, just because when people hear diaper drive, you think, little newborn babies, so people, a lot of times, donate the smaller sizes,” Almond said. “She takes care of our inventory for a year just by this one idea that she had to do something.”
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This year, Harrell said she created a new record and collected more than 10,000 diapers from across the country.
“This is just one of those things that no parent should have to worry about, period,” Harrell said.
Harrell said she’ll be back, bigger and better for year five.
Tender says will pick up the diapers from Harrell on Monday.
The organization’s last Diaper Bank of the year will be December 21st, and it is open to anyone.
If you would like to sign up for Tender’s resources or donate to their cause, you can visit www.thetenderfoundation.com
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