Something amazing is happening.
For those of you following along at home, you know that I’ve been working with Help a Mother Out since last summer to slowly but surely help needy families obtain diapers for their babies. A diaper-less baby is a sad baby, and I hate when babies are sad. Not only are they sad, but they are also in danger of health problems and being taken away from their parents. And that makes everybody sad.
So anyway. The way that I have been able to help is to yak about it online and throw parties. Our very grass roots effort doesn’t make any money whatsoever, so there’s no way I can do this kind of work even part time. I squeeze it in among all the other stuff going on in my life.
In this age of cause marketing, someone is finally stepping up. And that someone is a huge corporation – the company behind Huggies Brand Diapers.
Introducing the Every Little Bottom program!
The program has a single mission – to help get diapers to babies in need. As a first step, Huggies will donate up to 20 million diapers in the U.S. in the coming months.
Starting today, I will be a spokesperson for this effort to raise awareness of the all-too-common need for emergency diaper assistance among impoverished communities. In this role I’ll be doing the usual social media blah-blah: tweeting, Facebooking, blogging, and working the room at parties. I’ll have some partners in crime in Jenny, Jessica, Brittany, Caroline, Heather, and Whitney. (All very accomplished and very wholesome-looking mommy bloggers. I wonder if any of them swear as much as I do in real life. Well, we’ll find out!)
Even though I was surprised and shocked by the huge number of diaper-less families, I am still caught off guard when I tell people about this mission and they, too, are shocked. I’ll be working with Huggies, Ogilvy PR, and Kimberly-Clark on Every Little Bottom for the next 8 months. Hopefully, by the end of that period, more people will be mindful of this need.
Over the last year, so many bloggers have gotten fired up about getting diapers donated. The Huggies team has heard us. With the help of this community, they are in a position to make a really big difference. The announcement went out on the AP news wire this morning, and has already been picked up by ABC News online. I’m not discounting the “marketing” part of the “cause marketing” aspect of this whole thing – ultimately Huggies is a huge brand of a huge company, and someone, somewhere has to make money. If their product is useful and helpful, and they do this right, maybe everyone will win.
At the same time, in a large scale reproduction of the Amazon wishlists and partnerships that Help a Mother Out set up in California, Huggies has similarly partnered with diaper banks all over the country which will accept a major portion of their 80 gazillion diaper donation. In my role as Los Angeles chapter manager for HAMO, I’m working to get a giant diaper donation delivered to a special organization right here in town. Already, our partner LA Diaper Drive will be receiving 200,000 diapers next week!
While numbers like 200,000 and 20 million are staggering (not to mention 80 gazillion, which is unimaginable!) don’t forget that there are places where mothers stand in line every morning to receive a daily ration of five diapers, and that’s all they’ll have on hand. Imagine how precious those five diapers are to that mother, who might not otherwise get any. Now imagine how many mothers will have one less thing to worry about for a little while because of this program.
That’s what we can do.
Remember that episode of “Friends” in which Rachel interviews at Bloomingdale’s to become a buyer and she gets all excited and kind of weepy and flaps her hands and says of the job: “I’d be shopping!” Remember?
That’s kind of how I feel about Every Little Bottom. It is a job, but it is one for which I am perfectly suited and will resulting in something wonderful. And that’s what I mean when I say I want to use my power for good. Thank you, Huggies.
Stay tuned.
YAY!! Good for you and good for Huggies!