The Silent Shame of Diaper Need

In March 2009, Lisa Truong was nursing her nine-month-old baby while her three-year-old toddler napped when an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show changed her life’s trajectory. The program featured California families newly homeless from the Great Recession. As it concluded, Oprah issued a simple challenge: «Everybody can do something.» Truong felt that call deeply. 

With her friend, Rachel Fudge, they reached out to social service agencies with plans to organize a clothing drive where Truong learned about a startling safety net gap: warehouses were overflowing with clothes and donated toys, but there were virtually no diapers. And yet, diapers are consistently the most requested item for vulnerable families.

Sixteen years later, Help a Mother Out has distributed over 75 million diapers to families, but the problem has only intensified. “It is a silent public health issue,” she explains. “You’re not going to be driving down the street and see babies needing diapers the way you might see homeless encampments. You can visually see that symptom of societal support breaking down, but with diaper need, it’s more of an invisible crisis.”

Social workers confide that mothers can be reluctant to ask for help because “admitting that you don’t have enough diapers” carries shame and fear in having their children removed from their home. This fear drives desperate measures: mothers giving their babies less to drink to reduce diaper changes, skipping meals to afford diapers, and in extreme cases, as one mother from East Oakland told Truong, contemplating prostitution. “You have no idea what these diapers mean to me,” the woman said. “If I didn’t have these diapers, I would probably be out on the street selling my body to support my child.”

The math is sobering. With diapers costing between $90 and $135 monthly – a 48% increase since 2020 – and federal assistance programs like food stamps and WIC excluding diapers, over 300,000 California babies live in households that struggle to afford this basic necessity. In the Bay Area alone, Truong estimates 50,000 children could benefit from diaper support.

To address growing demand amid shrinking resources – reductions in state funding halved the organization’s budget in three years – Help a Mother Out continues to innovate beyond traditional charity models. In 2019, they launched ELO Baby, their own private-label diaper brand. And now they’re piloting a purchasing program, offering their high-quality, North American-made diapers to nonprofits at 35% below retail cost.

“If you have the means, it is so easy to help somebody,” Truong insists, echoing Oprah’s original message. As California faces what she describes as an anticipated “tidal wave of need” from federal safety net cuts and tariffs, that simple truth remains the organization’s driving force. In a state that ranks as the world’s fifth-largest economy, ensuring every baby has clean diapers shouldn’t be revolutionary – yet it remains urgently necessary.