How It Worked
Hildy says that most nonprofits look for money and then provide the service. For instance, a diaper bank might apply for grants to buy diapers so they can distribute them.
The Tucson Diaper Bank actually did it backwards. It built slowly, involving the community every step of the way and achieved scale over a period of several years.
Hildy explains:
We spent the first five years just talking about the issue and engaging people in the issue. As the result of that, we would have 60 or 70 schools involved, and multiply that by how many kids are bringing in packages of diapers. The kids would then say "Mom you've gotta listen to this radio station." They would listen on the way to school and someone would be talking about the issues. The kids would be talking about the issues in school. And the parents would be taking those issues to the workplace, and now the workplaces were doing diaper drives.Even today, most of the diapers that come into the diaper bank are donated and generated by engaging the community. We did, along the way, raise money and purchased sizes that we didn't have. But we realized very early on that if you engage the community, and you trust them to be compassionate and to act out of that compassion, they will rise to the occasion. And that is how you start creating change.
The infrastructure is based on shared resources as much as possible. We shared warehouse space with an organization that was already doing warehousing. Our initial 501(c)(3) was through fiscal sponsorship. What we did was look at all the functions the diaper bank would have to do and say, 'If somebody is already doing this let's partner with them just like we're partnering with the schools to bring in the diapers, let's partner with the warehousing.' As a result, the whole community feels like they own the diaper bank.
These are things that organizations don't do together. But they never saw the diaper bank as competing with them. What the diaper bank always saw was that our mission was the mission of everybody else in the community.
The answer to the question, 'How did we built the Diaper Bank?' is 'We built it from the inside out.' We built it from the ground up, based on community engagement. Now all it requires is one executive director and an assistant to coordinate all of that.
From Diaper Drive to Diaper Bank
Hildy and Dimitri realized that, "If something happens to the two of us, there's no succession plan for this little cute diaper drive that's still our philanthropic gift. There's no succession plan for this, and it's making a huge difference, so we need to build a diaper bank."
Hildy goes on, "And we looked around at what other diaper banks were doing so we could learn from them and get back to work. And that was when we realized we were about to build the first diaper bank in the country."
Hildy and Dimitri were already consultants to nonprofit organizations, but they had wondered, "Why, even with all the strategic planning in the world, was it so difficult for things to actually change in a community?"
The growth of the Diaper Drive was a revelation and led them to revamp all of their consulting work to focus on a model that actually works. They used the Diaper Bank to try out their ideas.
