Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Share The Love: Cloth Diaper Donation program

I have an immense love for cloth diapers.
It started the minute that I received our first package of them in the mail when Moose was only 8 months old. The cute patterns, the fluffy-ness, knowing that potentially harmful chemicals were no longer against my precious boy's bum and best of all, we would be saving money.
Since that first day, by stash has grown a little through giveaways and then baby showers for my little Squirrel.
Unfortunately for us, the diapers we originally bought for Moose are beginning to fall apart after 2 years of daily use so we would need more to get us through potty training with Moose and then the next 2 years with Squirrel. 
Knowing what I do now, I didn't want to buy a whole new stash of "Chinese cheapies" aka inexpensive diapers that are made and sent from China, most of these do not follow US labor regulations and are not the best quality. And we didn't have the money to buy a whole new stash.
I began the search for a way to keep Squirrel in cloth.

In my search, I came across Share the Love.
Share the Love is a cloth diaper donation program through Cotton Babies (the makers of BumGenius, Flip, and more) where families that are low income and part of the WIC program can borrow diapers for free for the length of time that their children are in diapers. 
The requirements are that you are part of the WIC program,
have at least one child in diapers,
write a short essay about what being able to participate in the program will do for you and how you will be able to help others in the community and spread the word,
live within 40 (or 45 I don't remember) miles of one of the diaper donation sites,
and fill out the form.
Within a few weeks you should hear back from one of the people in charge of the diaper donation site that you applied for letting you know if you were approved and if so, you can make arrangements to pick up some diapers.
For the boys, we were given a nice stash of natural fiber fitteds, flip covers and flip inserts to borrow.
It has helped out a ton already.

The great thing about the program is that they also accept donations of old diapers, so when you are done with your stash, they accept diapers that are in usable condition to loan out to other families.
My hope is that when we finish cloth diapering Squirrel, at least a few of my diapers will be in good enough condition that I can donate back to the program to help another family out.


If you are interested in checking out the Share the Love program, you can find them here: Share the Love website

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