How Baby2Baby scaled disaster relief for children across America

Executive overview

One in two American families struggles to afford diapers — yet diapers are taxed as a luxury item in half of US states. Baby2Baby was built to close that gap: distributing essential supplies to children in poverty, foster care, disasters, and hospitals through a network of partner organisations rather than direct distribution.

Kelly Sawyer Patricof and Norah Weinstein took over a tiny LA-based nonprofit 14 years ago and scaled it to serve over a million families annually, distribute 250 million diapers, and raise $18 million in a single gala night.

The core insight: serve partner organisations, not individuals — that's the only path to scale.

From 600 square feet to a national network

• Started in a 600 sq ft space on Pico Boulevard, collecting gently used items
• First big break: a photo of Jessica Alba and Nicole Richie at a scrappy event ran in Us Weekly
• Edelman PR called offering $100,000 cash and 100,000 diapers — they said yes before knowing what a pallet was
• Unloaded the truck themselves in heels; diapers were gone in one day
• Demand revealed instantly: families drove far, tied boxes to car roofs, came before and after work
• Key early decision: distribute through organisations, not individuals — avoids rationing decisions and enables true scale

Building the partner network

• Over 14 years, onboarded hospitals, foster care agencies, homeless shelters, schools, and community resource centres
• Tracks partner capacity precisely — from an 8-bed valley shelter to the entire LA Unified School District
• National reach: 50 states, 300 cities, ~1,000 partner organisations
• Geographic expansion started opportunistically: a baby bottle plant in Philadelphia led to their first East Coast partner
• Partners provide ground-level intelligence — in the LA fires, they knew which shelters had burned, which principals to call

Responding to the LA wildfires

• January 7th fires were different: Baby2Baby staff were personally evacuated; one employee lost their home
• Ran daily 9am all-hands huddles across all departments throughout the disaster
• Operated drive-through distributions from their own parking lot while simultaneously supplying shelters
• Sent truckloads of diapers, formula, baby food, clothes, and hygiene items
• Distributed 20 million items through the fire relief effort, funded by 40,000 individual donors
• Community showed up: hundreds of volunteers per day, including people who had lost their own homes
• Fourteen years of partner data meant they could activate faster than any new entrant could

The celebrity and corporate flywheel

• Celebrity relationships generated press; press generated corporate inbound calls
• Negotiation evolved: first Huggies deal was 100k diapers; by the Jennifer Garner partnership it was 5 million diapers and 5 million wipes; latest grant from Huggies is $8 million in cash and in-kind
• Annual gala grew from $1.1 million (year one) to ~$18 million — funds 60% of operating budget
• Gala format: food stations by LA's top chefs, live giving on stage, no rubber chicken — designed to be an event people actually want to attend
• Corporate in-kind donations (bottles, formula, clothes, socks) enabled half a billion items distributed to date
• 1.7 billion diapers requested this year alone against 250 million given out — the gap drives continued scaling

Policy work: two focused campaigns

• Stayed in a deliberately narrow lane — only advocacy directly tied to their core mission
• Diaper tax: diapers classified as a luxury item and taxed in many states; lobbied Sacramento repeatedly, lost multiple times, kept going
• California repealed the diaper tax in January 2020 — first state to do so; several states followed; 25 states remain
• Maternal mortality pilot: invited by the Biden White House to pilot a maternal health programme in the 3 states with highest maternal mortality rates
• Kamala Harris announced the partnership at Baby2Baby HQ
• Programme now active in 15 states, supported by Huggies; 20-item newborn supply kits given to new mothers at the point of birth
• Kits include supplies for the baby and the mother, plus health instructions and emergency escalation guidance
• Mental health is now the leading cause of maternal mortality — flagged as next area of focus

Operating principles

• Ask and listen before assuming what's needed — in every disaster, they ask partners what's required rather than guessing
• Say yes early: saying yes to every opportunity drove most of their early growth
• Learn to say no: gently used item donations and mismatched disaster supplies (e.g. puzzles during a fire) can undermine efficiency at scale
• Co-CEO structure works through complementary strengths: one brings legal rigour, one brings execution speed
• Team of 62; predominantly women; volunteer force packs all maternal newborn supply kits
• Any donation size matters — celebrity reputation creates a false impression that only large donors count