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This weekend marks the end of Diaper Need Awareness Week, a nationwide initiative launched by the National Diaper Bank Network (NDBN) to draw attention to the financial burden that the cost of diapers place on low-income families.

Last winter, an anonymous Vermont resident sent an email to the Connecticut-based organization – which helps support the hundreds of local diaper banks that collect and distribute free diapers around the U.S. – asking for help.

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“When will you help in Vermont? I can’t find any assistance with diapers and I’m in need,” wrote the parent of a six week old baby who said she was struggling to keep up.

But someone in Vermont had already noticed that need: Daphne Cybele of West Pawlet. On September 3 she voluntarily launched a website to help people Vermonters diapers to their neighbors in need. She also set up Twitter and Facebook pages that same week. Since then, Cybele’s campaign has generated roughly 1,000 diaper donations.

“I hope it takes off more,” she said. Last year’s deaths of two Vermont toddlers got Cybele thinking about all the stresses – many financial – that families have to deal with these days.

“Diaper need is often a hidden consequence of poverty,” Troy Moore, spokesperson for the NDBN said. “While we can’t say that every infant or toddler that lives in poor and low-income families suffers from diaper need, we do know anecdotally that the two go hand-in-hand.”

A little more than 40 percent of Vermont’s children under three years old live in low-income families and nearly half of all the state’s children in low-income households live with a single parent, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty.

“Diapers are in high demand,” in Vermont, according to Judith Stermer, a spokesperson for the Vermont Food Bank. Stermer said the food bank serves 153,000 Vermonters annually, of which 10,600 are children under five years of age.

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“It is one of the items that the people we serve can’t buy with their 3SquaresVT (assistance) and it’s an expensive item,” she said. 3SquaresVT is the federal food stamp program that helps families with children buy food.

The average newborn needs 10 to 12 diaper changes a day, or about 372 a month. The need slowly decreases over the first year to about 8 diaper changes a day, or about 248 a month, according to the New Kids Center.

Another website started by Lisa Boerum, who owns Awesome Beginnings 4 Children, found that “the average cost of disposable diapers for one baby from birth to potty training is about $2,400 and for a family (with) two the cost rises to $4,889.40.”

“The diaper drive is just a way, however small, that I felt I could take action and help young families struggling to afford the bare necessities,” said Cybele.

At first, Cybele wished to donate diapers herself and quickly learned there wasn’t an easy way to go about it. She wasn’t ready to take on creating a diaper bank – which typically collects, stores and distributes the donated diapers – but she did feel like she could manage setting up a website, now VermontDiaperDrive.com, and encouraging people to donate.

The portal allows individuals to contribute diapers to the Manchester Community Food Cupboard, the food shelves at the Bennington Rutland Opportunity Council Offices, the Upper Valley Haven shelter, the John Graham Shelter in Vergennes, and the Dee Diaper Drive, run by of Dee Physical Therapy in South Burlington, which benefits the Committee on Temporary Shelter (COTS). Cybele will be happy to add other organizations that would also like to be involved.

Currently, the website states that only disposable diapers are accepted, but Cybele says she is working on a component that would allow for cloth diapers. Advocates find cloth diapers to be much less expensive to use as long as the user cleans them without a service.

Troy Moore also pointed out that the recipients of diaper donations oftentimes do not have a washer and dryer in their home.

“Many low-income and poor families don’t have access to washers and dryers,” he said before adding, “and for many single moms often working two jobs they just don’t have the time to do that.”

Having said that, Moore says there are active cloth diaper banks and many banks that offer both kinds of diapers. “It is whatever works for the family,” he said.

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