Why National Make-A-Will Month Matters And How Your Legacy Can Help Families in Need

August is National Make-A-Will Month, a timely reminder for all of us to take an important step in planning for the future. Whether you’re creating a will for the first time or revisiting an existing one, this month offers a meaningful opportunity to reflect on the legacy you want to leave behind.

I’ve had the privilege of witnessing how planned giving, especially through wills and bequests, can transform an organization’s work and deepen its impact for generations to come. These kinds of gifts not only honor personal values, they also shape a stronger future for children and families.

What Does a Will Really Do?

At its core, a will ensures your wishes are honored and your loved ones are cared for. It can be a powerful tool to support causes and communities that matter most to you. For many, that includes the advancement of early childhood health, supporting parents, or the commitment to investing in long term solutions for families.

Why Include NDBN in Your Will?

At the National Diaper Bank Network (NDBN), we believe everyone should have access to the essentials they need to thrive – starting with diapers. For millions of families across the U.S., diaper need is a hidden crisis that impacts not only a child’s health and comfort, but also a caregiver’s ability to work and participate in community life.

A legacy gift to the National Diaper Bank Network is a powerful way to support a child’s right to a clean, dry diaper and a family’s right to the essentials that make opportunity possible.

Planned gifts help us:

• Support and strengthen our network of diaper banks across the country.
• Advocate for public policies that increase access to essential baby supplies.
• Innovate sustainable solutions to address basic needs and poverty.

These are not short-term fixes. They are long-term investments in a healthier, more just society.

It’s Easier Than You Think

Making or updating your will doesn’t require a large estate or complex planning. In fact, many people include charitable gifts simply by naming a nonprofit as a beneficiary of a percentage of their estate, retirement plan, or life insurance policy.

When you choose to include NDBN in your plans, you’ll join a special community of changemakers committed to ending diaper need for good.

This August, Take the First Step

Whether you work with an attorney or use an online tool, creating a will is one of the most impactful decisions you can make. And if you’ve already made your will, now is the perfect time to review it.

As you consider your legacy, I invite you to think about the children and caregivers we serve and how your lasting generosity could help close the diaper gap in communities nationwide.

Together, we can ensure every baby gets the essentials they need to thrive not just today, but for generations to come.

By Troy Moore

Chief of External Affairs, National Diaper Bank Network

I am truly honored that my career brought me to the National Diaper Bank Network and the Alliance for Period Supplies, because my daily work isn’t merely professional, it’s quite personal. You see, I’m a Girl Dad.

I remember vividly the first time I held my daughter. I said, “Hi. Welcome to the world. I want you to have a wonderful life, filled with love, friendship and happiness. I’ll try not to let you down.”

From the moment I met her, I embraced singing silly songs, reading imaginative stories, and even changing the smelliest diapers. When adolescence came, discussions of menstruation and period supplies were simply normal. As she has grown, so have I. My paternalistic tendencies of protecting, providing and problem solving have evolved into listening, supporting and embracing all that she is, at 24, and who she will become.

With Father’s Day approaching I want to put out a challenge to my fellow dads. Let’s flip the focus a bit…away from a day all about us…to a day to reflect on the quiet expectation of responsibility.

As fathers, we innately care for our children. Caring should be an expectation we have for ourselves, and a responsibility we should welcome. Likewise, as fathers we should have empathy and compassion for the children of our fellow fathers. We should care for the children around us – especially the ones we don’t know – be they down the street, in another part of our country, or living in far away lands. To not care is unimaginable to me.

Recently, I read a post on Twitter (yes, I’m old-school) by Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex). He wrote:

“Compassion is a question of humanity, even before it is a religious matter. Before being believers, we are called on to be human.”

While he has no children of his own, Pope Leo understands what it is to be a father. He understands the quiet expectation of responsibility. That we as fathers are called upon to care for the children of others, as we would care for our own.

My daughter expects that of me…and I refuse to let her down.

By Joanne Samuel Goldblum

CEO, National Diaper Bank Network

The Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee (E&C) are proposing structural changes to Medicaid, as a cost-cutting measure, within the tax reconciliation bill. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary estimate is that at least 8.6 million people would lose health insurance, as a result of these changes. Medicaid enrollees are primarily children and their parents. More than 40% of births in the United States are covered by Medicaid. This means that the proposal now in committee would cut off access to health care for millions of children and their mothers. 

It is not okay to put mothers and babies at risk. Members of Congress surely must know that. Now is the time for all Americans to remind them. The National Diaper Bank Network (NDBN) has more than 240 member diaper banks across the United States, supported by good people – people of all political stripes – who believe that every baby has the right to be clean, dry, and healthy. This essay is not a foray into partisan politics. It is simply a review of the facts by someone who has spent her career trying to keep kids healthy.

A wealth of evidence shows that providing preventive care, like visits to pediatricians for check-ups, actually saves money. Furthermore, there are studies demonstrating increased educational attainment for children enrolled in Medicaid and decreased disability in adulthood.  Absent good primary care, children will come into emergency rooms with serious illnesses that might have been averted. This will stretch the financial and clinical resources of hospitals, many of which are struggling already. These cuts would result in growing medical debt, as families will be required to cover new and larger copays for medical care.  More hospital closures may occur, impaling an already fragile maternal and child health care system, especially in rural areas of our country.  To be clear: this will put anyone birthing or being born in these communities at risk – regardless of who pays for their health care.

Proposed cuts would eliminate insurance coverage for post-partum mothers, services that have been repeatedly shown to result in decreases in maternal and infant mortality. The changes being discussed would make it harder for eligible infants and children to enroll in Medicaid, penalize states that provide Medicaid coverage for undocumented children, add new copayments for preventative healthcare services such as prenatal care and well child pediatric visits, and allow providers to deny services if a parent or child on Medicaid cannot pay their copay. 

A $35 co-pay is, tragically, enough to keep children from getting critical services such as developmental screenings and hearing and vision testing.  NDBN’s research shows that one in two young families struggles to afford the diapers they need to keep their children clean. Families list many items they cut back on – including food and medical visits – to keep babies diapered. Think of families with multiple children – or one toddler who picks up every ear infection going through their child care center? Parents will be faced with impossible choices.

The measures E&C is considering to change Medicaid seem outrageous. Perhaps they are meant to be just that – so shocking that people who care about women and children’s health will be too disheartened to organize and respond. But the advocacy community I know is determined, focused, and most importantly in this case – quick on its feet.

This is not a done deal. It’s a horrible idea that can be stopped if well-informed people tell their representatives right now that we did not send them to Washington to endanger mothers and babies. 

By Regan Moss

Student Caregivers 

Over 10 million students in the US are student-caregivers. 5.4 million are student parents, accounting for roughly 1 in 4 undergraduates, and nearly 1 in 3 graduate students. Over 50% of these student parents have children under the age of six. Nearly 5 million of these students provide care to someone who is aging or sick, often parents or grandparents. 

Student-caregivers are individuals who provide care – emotional, physical, financial or other support – to someone, often a child or older family member, while in school. Care work can take many forms, but we, the team at the Caregiver Initiative at Auburn University, are working to craft an exhaustive definition of student-caregivers so that all students can be supported by our university, while also working to maintain considerations for differences in needs, roles, and experiences among this student population. 

The Caregiver Initiative [CIT] has integrated questions about caregiving status into institutional surveys, including entrance, exit, and graduation surveys. From these efforts, we’ve learned that 6% of our undergraduate students are caregivers at some point during their undergraduate careers. Only ~3% of student-caregivers at Auburn are a caregiver before starting college, indicating that 97% of those who identify as caregivers assume that role after starting college.  Our campus partners have also shared that over 180 of graduate student parents, a subset of student-caregivers, have reached out for financial support for child care. 

Defining & Statistics about Diaper Access 

According to The National Diaper Bank Network Diaper Check 2024 study, 1 in 2 US households with young children experience diaper need, the lack of access to a diaper supply adequate for keeping a young child clean, dry, and healthy. A 2017 research study documenting the experiences of families with diaper need found that adults who struggled most often to meet their child’s needs for diapers also struggled to meet their own educational goals. 

Diaper Access Among Student Caregivers 

Like caregivers who are not students, student-caregivers experience diaper need.

Within the first year of life, caregivers may pay $1,500 for an infant’s diapers. Adult incontinence supplies (e.g., bladder control briefs), which many aging or sick adults require, can cost $3,600 a year. The average college student spends $12,300/year on living expenses alone. Covering school and hygiene product expenses can be challenging for many students. Just 40% of full-time students are employed while attending school, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Nationally, many student caregivers are the sole provider for their young children.  Among the Auburn student body, many student caregivers are first-generation students and Pell-grant recipients. 

 Student-caregivers report that the lack of supportive institutional climates and policies can make it challenging to fully be a student and a caregiver. For example, diaper access among student caregivers can create additional barriers to attending school and participating in campus life. Child care providers generally require caregivers to provide all of the diapers a child uses during the child care day, even if child care tuition is subsidized by grants or vouchers. If student-caregivers do not have access to the diapers required, they may have to miss class, study groups, work, or other campus activities to care for their child instead.  

CIT’s ongoing research will seek to provide better estimates of diaper need among student caregivers and best practices for addressing diaper access on college campuses. Insights from the National Diaper Bank Network reveal that 1 in 4 (25%) of parents and caregivers with diaper need reported having to miss work or school because they did not have enough diapers for their child to attend child care.

Building an On-Campus Diaper Supply

In 2022, CIT’s team began benchmarking efforts in our community and on-campus to understand opportunities to address diaper access. Though we did not survey to estimate diaper need, we knew that there were student-caregivers on our campus, and rightfully assumed that many would benefit from increased access to diapers. 

A local PERIOD. chapter had supplied period products in our on-campus food pantry and we approached the food pantry to see if it was possible to supply diapers through their services. As a menstrual equity advocate in the state, I was very familiar with the National Diaper Bank Network and worked to understand how we could connect to Bundles of Hope Diaper Bank, the diaper bank in our state. After discussions on the feasibility of stocking the pantry, we established partnerships with staff and faculty across campus who were able to help pick-up diapers at Bundles of Hope Diaper Bank, located 2 hours away. We were able to secure funds to help reimburse drivers for the mileage driven between the diaper bank and campus. 

Realizing that diaper need can be stigmatizing, as can the experience of being a student-caregiver, we’ve worked to engage multiple campus stakeholders in the diaper distribution process, aiming to promote both help-seeking behaviors and a campus culture that destigmatizes material need and encourages systems change to address access. Members of our campus community can sign up to volunteer to help stock the diaper supplies. Students and staff who volunteer to stock the pantry signed up consistently every month to help unload vehicles when drivers returned from Bundles of Hope Diaper Bank. We’re hoping to expand on this and consider educational campaigns for student supports to recognize the need for diapers and other material supplies and also to ‘norm’ needs on campus and destigmatize accessing support. 

To date, across 6 semesters (Fall of 2023-Spring of 2025), we have distributed over 19,000 diapers. The pantry often runs out of supplies, as more students are becoming aware of the resource. 

Opportunities for Growth: Building a Self-Sustaining Diaper Bank

Originally, we partnered with Bundles of Hope Diaper Bank to supply diapers through our on-campus food pantry. However, access to the food pantry is contingent on economic status. Diaper access impacts people who are low-income and high-income; unemployed and employed. Student-caregivers may be experiencing diaper need but not be able to access the campus food pantry because their household income is too high. Expanding diaper distribution to additional locations outside of the campus food pantry will ensure everyone in the university community experiencing diaper need, regardless of economic status, is able to provide for their loved one. This also ensures that staff and faculty can also access diapers.

Opportunities for Growth: Seeking Long-Term Funding

We’ve integrated diaper distribution with existing support services for students aimed at alleviating material need. However, we’ve realized that diaper need supersedes the capacity of these services, and we’ve sought out additional funding mechanisms to move beyond distributing a supplemental diaper supply to distributing a reliable, substantial diaper supply. Currently, our limited supply cannot give people a full month of diapers, but can provide a few extra diapers to get them through the month. We’re aiming to expand so that students can take as many diapers as they need and rely on this resource. 

Opportunities for Growth: Supplying Adult Diapers

Many adult caregivers also need access to adult incontinence products or ‘adult bladder control briefs.’  While many diaper distribution programs provide diapers for infants and young children, our initiative is also able to respond to broader caregiver needs. We’re working to improve our supply to ensure adult briefs are also available. Conversations about diaper access have also led to conversations about formula and baby food access, lactation spaces, childcare/elderly care preference, availability, affordability, and accessibility. Ongoing multi-stakeholder meetings across campus have worked to bridge silos and create a network of support to create solutions for unmet needs. 

Opportunities to Understand Diaper Access in Your Own Context

 Universities should assume that where there are students, there are student-caregivers. And where there are student-caregivers, there is diaper need. Universities should assume diaper access is a necessity and work to better understand drivers of diaper need among student-caregivers and preferences students have for how diaper access can be achieved.

The Role of the University in Addressing Diaper Need: Call to Action

Meeting the material needs of students is critical for students to achieve their academic and career goals. University stakeholders can consider several questions to understand how to respond based on their own context.

Understanding the Population 

1. Who are student caregivers at your university? 
2. What unique roles do they face in their dual roles?
3. What on-campus and off-campus spaces do they frequent? 
4. How do students’ caregiving experiences enhance the student body? 

Considerations for Integration and Feasibility 

Map the current resources available to you on campus. Identify the assets of campus partners and offices. Identify existing resources that student caregivers may also need. Work with many people and offices across campus to co-design the distribution process.  

3. What existing programs do students trust and reliably access? How could you integrate diaper supply with these existing programs? 
   3. a)Would these help connect students to other relevant services? 
4. What efforts can you create across campus to ensure diaper access is not stigmatized?
5.   What educational campaigns can you launch at your university to increase awareness of diaper access? 

Considerations for Scalability & Sustainability 

6. How might the demand on your campus grow or change over time?
7. What donor bases or off-campus organizations may be able to partner to continue to fund the effort?
8. How can students become advocates for the diaper bank? 
9. What places or spaces on campus do students go to learn about resources?
10. Are there students who may need diapers that do not frequent your ‘main’ campus? How can you increase access to them?

Basic needs banks are committed to the idea that everyone should have the material basic necessities that they need to thrive. Everyone means everyone, thus basic needs banks must always strive to be intersectional in how they offer their services.

What is intersectional feminism?

The term “intersectional feminism” was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a legal scholar and civil rights advocate at the forefront of critical race theory. “Sexism isn’t a one-size-fits-all phenomenon,” she said. “It doesn’t happen to Black and White women the same way.” Crenshaw called out the feminist movement, which had historically been led by White women, for ignoring the experiences of discrimination faced by Black and Brown women, who simultaneously face racism and sexism. For example, one of the early victories of U.S. feminists was achieving women’s suffrage. Yet Black women continued to be denied access to the polls in the Jim Crow South. If White feminists has been thinking and acting interesectionally, their allyship would have compelled them to protest this exclusion just as vigorously as they had protested when their own voting rights were denied.

Today intersectionality highlights identities beyond gender and race, including sexuality, gender identity, disability status and more. All of the identities that we hold affect our experiences of privilege and discrimination.

What makes an organization intersectional?

A good allyship definition is: Acting in solidarity with a group to which you do not belong. The first step toward allyship is listening. That’s one reason why so many of the National Diaper Bank Network (NDBN) benchmarks for member growth emphasize community connections. A basic needs bank has to know who it is serving and if services are delivered in a way that creates barriers for some groups of people.

Allyship also insists on representation, among staff, board members and partner agencies. Anyone involved with a nonprofit must have the freedom and power to bring their identity to work, to offer insight on how policies and programs do or do not serve the groups they identify with.

Intersectional feminism and period poverty

Period supply programs need to take into account varied cultural beliefs around menstruation; how poverty differs between racial and ethnic groups; and how menstrual dysphoria may affect LGBTQ people.

When we talk about period stigma, we are very much talking about the perception of menstruation in the dominant White culture. But that’s not the only game in town. For example, the Kwek Society provides period supplies in indigenous communities. The group also educates about “Moon Time,” a traditional way of looking at menstruation positively, complete with community celebrations of first menses.

A growing body of research shows that women of color experience period poverty at higher rates. For example, a study by a George Mason University researcher showed that on a college campus, Black and Hispanic women were most likely to experience period poverty, with first generation and immigrant students also at higher risk. This folds in with a broader societal inequity in which Black and Hispanic women face overall poverty at elevated rates. Fighting period poverty should be an act of racial justice and as such needs to examine how location, language and other barriers can be overcome to get products to the people who need them.

Period poverty overwhelmingly affects women and needs to be seen in the context of other gendered forms of economic inequality. However, people experiencing gender dysphoria are very likely to also experience menstrual dysphoria. A recent study of transgender and non-binary teens identified at birth as female showed that 93% experienced distress around their periods and wanted their menses to stop. Programs that fight period poverty can help by making sure to use inclusive language. They can also partner with clinical and social service organizations to make sure that clients who do not identify as female get access to important health information. We highly recommend looking into the work of the Period Pantry Project, which surveyed LGBTQ clients to find better ways to serve them.

Intersectional feminism and diaper need

Research on diaper need has found that Black and Hispanic women are significantly more likely than White women to report diaper need. The same research shows an association between diaper need and maternal depression, which plays a large role in the national maternal health crisis. Thus addressing diaper need is a key strategy to promote health equity.

The nonprofit sector itself has an equity problem. A 2023 report showed that Black-led and Black-benefitting nonprofits are largely operating on lean budgets and heavily reliant on volunteer labor – in large part because their access to funding is limited. Previous studies showed that organizations run by Black women have poor access to financial support and that funders tend to attach more strings to grants given to these organization.

The Black Diaper Bank Leaders Coalition is a member-led group at the National Diaper Bank Network where Black women leading diaper banks support each other and share knowledge and resources. NDBN has a staff liaison working with the coalition to bring ideas back to the national organization about how it can be more responsive to the needs of these organizations.

Acting – and thinking – locally

One of the great strengths of NDBN is the network itself, more than 300 independent nonprofits dedicated to serving their communities equitably. The national organization leads with a commitment to serving all communities and makes tools to do so available to all members. Members come up with great strategies to serve their particular communities and share them through venues like a member listserv and our annual U.S. Conference on Poverty and Basic Needs.

“I’m proud of the work we’ve done to promote an intersectional approach to basic needs,” said NDBN CEO Joanne Samuel Goldblum. “We know that there is much more that we can do to make sure that diaper need and period poverty are wiped out across all communities in the United States. We’re committed to doing just that.”