Banking on KC – Susan Belger Angulo of HappyBottoms
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Kelly Scanlon: Welcome to Banking on KC. I'm your host, Kelly Scanlon. Thank you for joining us. With us on this episode is Susan Belger Angulo, co-executive director and development director of HappyBottoms, an organization that provides diapers for families in need. Welcome, Susan.
Susan Belger Angulo: Thank you, Kelly
Kelly Scanlon: HappyBottoms provides diapers for people who need them, families, children, and they I'm just really curious to know what inspired the founding of HappyBottoms and what larger issue or need is the organization trying to address?
Susan Belger Angulo: Kelly, our founder executive director at the time was a woman. Her name was Jill Gajkowski. She had a daughter who was two and she was. Deciding whether or not she wanted to go back to work, um, in the advertising agency or what else was out in the community. And she learned about diaper need and decided that she would consider doing a diaper drive.
And her goal was to collect 7, 000 diapers in 7 days. Was this at her church? Was
Kelly Scanlon: it at her Workplace.
Susan Belger Angulo: She did this out of her house. She just
Kelly Scanlon: put the word out on her own. She just
Susan Belger Angulo: put the word out on her own and she partnered with several children's organizations like The Learning Tree, um, the toy store in Prairie Village and as she partnered with those kid friendly stores, at the end of that seven days, she had actually collected twice as many diapers as she had thought she would be.
Collect, so collecting over 14, 000 diapers, and then decided that she needed to find an avenue of how to get those diapers into the hands of families that needed them. And so she worked with a couple of partner agencies at the time, identifying agencies that could help. Could accept diapers and what she found was a month later, those agencies had already distributed those 14, 000 diapers and that they needed more.
And so she then started doing some additional diaper drives.
Kelly Scanlon: Okay. But still out of her home. Still out of her home. And then, when did she realize, okay, this isn't just something that I'm doing on the side. This is something that's going to be an ongoing need. I'm going to formalize this and, and gave it a name.
Susan Belger Angulo: Well, she, um, quickly figured out the name. We love it. It's so cute and playful. And she started the avenues of getting our 501c3 in place. There was a little hiccup in the road. They were getting ready to be relocated, she and her husband and daughter, and so now she needed to find a new executive director to take over.
When that happened, she handed an envelope that had $1,400 in it. There were eight partner agencies at the time. This was less than a year later.
Kelly Scanlon: What time period are we talking about here?
Susan Belger Angulo: We're talking 2009 is when she did her first diaper drive. And by July of 2010, she was off on a new adventure.
Kelly Scanlon: Okay.
So in a year, she had collected. Thousands and thousands of diapers, given them all away and started the process of 501c3 and then trained and handed the reins over to someone else at this point. Talk to us about some of the programs that you have that are structured to meet the needs of families who need diapers.
Susan Belger Angulo: First and foremost, I think everybody. needs to know that diaper need has continued to grow wider and deeper in our community. We used to say one in three families needed our support, now nearly one in two families need our support. We started with just looking at those partner agencies, um, and really supporting them and the families that they serve.
Early on with the new executive director in place in 2010, we realized that there was an opportunity for us to partner with some of the non profit hospitals in our community. And we created a program called Bundles of Joy. Liz Sutherland was the next executive director that had come in, and Huggies had given us one million diapers as a gift.
We were one of only five diaper banks at the time to receive this gift. Well, we had. A million size one diapers, and we didn't know what to do with them. Sure. And that's how the Bundles of Joy program became a part of our organization. So we partnered with KU Hospital, Truman Medical Center, several others.
We have currently have five hospital partners to date. They identify families that need diapers that are on Medicaid, on food stamps, um, in one of those government assistance programs. And they are given 75 diapers when they leave the hospital with an informational card that tells a family what to do.
Where they can go to continue to receive diapers until their child turns four or becomes potty trained.
Kelly Scanlon: So, so you work through intermediaries. You don't distribute directly to the public. We do
Susan Belger Angulo: not, which we believe is a great model to have because we know that families will go into our over 68 partner agencies.
to receive diapers, but then what we hope happens is the partner agencies are able to provide those wraparound services that they might need. So maybe a family needs clothing or food or rent assistance and that is just an opportunity for the family to gain more help in giving them a What we say, a hand up, not a hand out.
We have worked with Children's Mercy Hospital and Parents as Teachers to create a potty training curriculum that is really put into place because we knew that families were trying to potty train their children. Too early, which then causes some real anxiety for parents that could also cause stress and the possibility of abuse.
And we wanted to eliminate all of those. So there's an assessment that a parent goes through. They answer four or five questions. If most of those are yeses, then we know that the child is ready to start potty training. And we will provide them with a potty training kit that is a step stool, a potty ring.
A board book for the child and a sticker chart to help the parents, um, support their children along that way.
Kelly Scanlon: So, is the urgency to potty train a child based on, uh, the expense of the diapers? Absolutely. So, that's why they're in a hurry to get children potty trained. What impact has HappyBottoms observed in the community through its services?
What have you seen and how are you measuring that?
Susan Belger Angulo: I think just Being able to provide diapers for families that are struggling. I think the interesting piece is that we are one of seven diaper banks in the state of Missouri. We cover most of the counties south of I-70. But we, there are several, several counties north of I 70 that still are lacking um, diaper banks that can provide diapers for their families.
It is really about making sure that families have diapers. We find that parents tend to leave their children in soiled diapers way too long, which causes a lot of health issues, uh, for the children. And then families have to have diapers and disposable diapers to go into daycare. And so not only does it become a health issue, but it also becomes an economic issue. So we feel like while we are changing lives one diaper at a time, we're also helping families be able to join the workforce and provide for their families. So really when you talk about the impact that we have in the community, really it is about helping families just navigate- to relieve one set of stressors that they might have. You know, I think every nonprofit should hope that they put themselves out of business someday and we do that as well and we do that through a lot of legislative advocacy, just really trying to, to help families, um, navigate.
Kelly Scanlon: So when you talk about legislative advocacy, for example.
Susan Belger Angulo: So for example the seven diaper banks in the state of Missouri have formed a Missouri Diaper Bank Coalition. Um, we partnered together. One, it was started to, um, really kind of like what were best practices in the early days? What, what was the diaper bank of St. Louis, seeing that maybe the Diaper Bank of Kansas City, HappyBottoms, needed to be aware of.
And likewise, the Diaper Bank of the Ozarks. We are the three larger diaper banks, but we found that the smaller diaper banks, the Diaper Bank in Columbia and Jefferson City and down in the Boothill of Missouri also wanted to learn from us. Um, and then we realized that the state of Missouri taxes diapers at the luxury tax level of 4.225%. Diapers are not a luxury. They are a necessity. And so for the past three years, we have tried to advocate at the state level to get sales tax reduced or eliminated. We know that there's also the county and the city taxes, um, in Kansas City alone, if you were to buy diapers at your local grocery store in Kansas City, Jackson County, diapers would be taxed nearly at 9.825%.
Kelly Scanlon: So I guess the obvious question then is, uh, kind of harkens back to the original diaper drive, uh, that spurred all of this. Where do these diapers come from? Are they all donations?
Susan Belger Angulo: We are one of 200 diaper banks that are part of what is a national network called the National Diaper Bank Network, um, NDBN provides us the opportunity to purchase diapers through partnerships of manufacturers at a reduced cost.
So if someone were to donate $10 in cash to us, I am able to provide $20 to $25 worth of diapers, um, through my buying power, through those partnerships.
Kelly Scanlon: It's obvious that addressing these diaper needs is a huge challenge. So talk to us about some of the biggest hurdles that HappyBottoms faces and how you overcome those.
Susan Belger Angulo: So in the early years when we were one of the first, um, six diaper banks to be part of the National Diaper Bank Network, there was a study done in 2012 through the Huggies brand, that looked at the need of what a family could afford and what they still needed to buy. And so that study showed that families needed about 10 additional diapers a week.
And so the national kind of benchmark for distributing diapers to families was to provide 50 diapers per month, per child. That was filling the need and the gap. As we kind of came out of COVID, and COVID really changed the trajectory of how we served families during that time. And as we finally got our footing back under us, um, because we virtually following Harvesters to every outreach that Harvesters was doing during COVID.
And we were taking our truck and we were providing diapers and we really were not collecting data at the time. We just knew that families were struggling and that they needed our help. So, as we came out of COVID, we realized that what that did was that families were getting more than those 50 diapers per month.
Only because we were trying to fill the need, but we were also trying to keep ourselves safe. So, sometimes we were giving boxes of diapers to families, and they were getting more diapers. Every single box of diapers comes in different quantities. As we started coming out of COVID, we started doing our own study because we felt like we needed to do research because what we were seeing was that the gap was widening and deepening.
And so we worked with three of our partner agencies who had social workers on staff that were able to provide a hundred to 150 diapers a month to families. We did a pre-survey and a post-survey, and we landed that families really needed more like 75 diapers a month. And so, as an organization, we decided that we were going to start giving 75 diapers per family per month.
But in order to do that, we needed to go to all of those 68 partner agencies. Could they handle that many more diapers that they were receiving a month? And could our staff wrap that many more diapers? And oh, by the way, I needed a bigger box truck.
Kelly Scanlon: Right. So it's, so there's all of these very practical considerations.
Susan Belger Angulo: Exactly. It would be, it would be really great to be able to say, yes, tomorrow we're going to start giving out 75 diapers, but we knew we needed to do a little bit of homework going up a third. So we were giving out. 50 diapers and going to 75. And we did that starting in March of this year. What we didn't expect, um, what we didn't put into our plan was the increased number of families that were going to need our help.
And our partner agencies are adding, on average, 25 to 50 new families a month because of inflation and the cost of what's happening at the grocery stores. And diapers have tripled in cost over the last three years.
Kelly Scanlon: What are the eligibility requirements for someone to receive diapers through your program?
Susan Belger Angulo: Right now, we are virtually helping all families that need our help at this point. Last year, we decided that we were not putting a financial burden on a family. We didn't want families to have to prove that they were poor. If they needed diapers, we knew that they needed diapers. And many of our families will not pick up diapers every single month.
It's really funny. We're, we have it built into our budget that they are getting diapers every month, but they are like, Well, we have leftover diapers from, maybe we didn't use as many, maybe a family member gave us a box of diapers, and we feel like somebody else needs them more than us, which is so wonderful and generous.
Our community is so wonderful in that respect. Right now, we do have an application process. The application process includes asking the questions if families are on government assistance. At this point, we have not felt like that has been abused of, you know, being able to provide diapers to whomever. And what we're seeing is most of the time you would expect that people receiving diapers are single moms with their kids, um, and that is the farthest from the truth. 51 percent of our families receiving diapers are living in a mom-and-dad household with at least one, if not both parents working one job. And many times some of the parents are working two jobs and still can't make it.
Kelly Scanlon: How many diapers would you estimate that you give out on a monthly or an annual basis?
Susan Belger Angulo: Probably about 123 percent over last year at this time. Last year at this time we were distributing a little over 276,000 diapers out the door. Um, and, and we knew that that was going to increase with going to 75. But we are distributing well over 577,000 diapers out the door every single month.
Kelly Scanlon: Wow.
That's, that's not an annual figure. That's a monthly figure. Monthly figure. So over a half a million diapers a month. I know you've got various initiatives and projects. What are some of them that you have on the horizon that our listeners might be interested in knowing about?
Susan Belger Angulo: We have one major event every single year.
Um, this year it will be a celebration of our 15th year anniversary. Um, we are also, um, we're Probably less than two weeks, we will be handing out our 25th millionth diaper, 25 million diapers in 15 years. It's amazing. Um, so there will be a little bit of a celebration as we hand out that packet, that Twenty-fifth millionth diaper, uh, but going back to the event, it will be held at Ameristar Casino on the 19th of September. It is where we will kick off fundraising for the rest of the year. Currently giving out 577,000 diapers a month. We're having to purchase two truckloads of diapers every single month just to keep up with the need, um, just to give listeners perspective, each truckload of diapers is around $49,000. So for us, fundraising is key of what we're doing. Diaper drives are, we love when families get together, communities, churches, neighborhoods get together to do a diaper drive. Listeners can come and wrap diapers at our location at 79th and Warnell.
They can also do a mobile diaper drive. If you can't. Bring your office to us. We will take the diapers to your office. Um, there is a small fee attached with that, um, but it's a great team-building opportunity.
Kelly Scanlon: So this Diaper Bowl you have, how does that work? It sounds fun. The name sounds fun.
Susan Belger Angulo: Diaper Bowl is fun.
It was actually one of those events that came out of COVID as well. Normally our event was in November, um, in our warehouse. And as we were coming out of COVID, I said, um, to our then executive director, would you consider us doing an outside event? I think people would feel more comfortable. Everybody loves tailgating.
We wanted to move our event from November to September, and it really tied in well to have a tailgate-style party in our parking lot. Diaper Bowl is very much a fun atmosphere, we do a live and silent auction. We have fun to need. We have a live band. This year we're going to have a live band plus a DJ.
We're still going to do live and silent auction. We've got some Chiefs mystery boxes. We will have a golden raffle ticket and just a fun way to celebrate 15 years.
Kelly Scanlon: So you mentioned, uh, the volunteer opportunities that you have available through HappyBottoms. You need people to wrap the diapers and so forth.
What are some of the other ways that people can engage?
Susan Belger Angulo: Well, we actually have a really fun opportunity coming up on, as we lead into our Diaper Bowl, Kansas City Chiefs play the Cincinnati Bengals on September 15th. And we have a diaper bank in Cincinnati that is very close to HappyBottoms. They are called Sweet Cheeks.
And so we are gearing up to do a fun, who has the most loyal fans and the most generous fans. And little did we know that Joe Burrow's number is number nine. And of course, Patrick Mahomes is number 15 and they're playing the game on 9/15. So the stars are aligned. And so we hope that everybody will join in the fun and let Kansas City win this Most Generous Fans.
We're still working out opportunities there, a chance to donate, to give back to HappyBottoms, and then just going to our website and learning more about us. Um, Happybottoms.org, there's always a donate button in the top right-hand corner. We always say no gift is too large or too small. We can take a $5 gift.
We will take one diaper. If somebody has leftover diapers, their child has outgrown, um, we will accept open packages of diapers as well because we can marry those diapers with other diapers that are given in the community to, um, get into the hands of families in need.
Kelly Scanlon: So happybottoms.org, you can go out there, learn more about the organization, and find out ways that you can engage very importantly there.
Susan, thank you so much for all the work that you and your team do to help families and children here in the Kansas City area. We really appreciate that and for taking the time to come and spread the word about this wonderful service.
Susan Belger Angulo: Kelly, thank you so much for giving us this opportunity.
Joe Close: This is Joe Close, President of Country Club Bank. Thank you to Susan Belger Angulo for being our guest on this episode of Banking on KC. HappyBottom's commitment to alleviating diaper need removes one layer of stress for struggling families. It ensures children have the diapers they need, improving their health and well-being, and helps families move closer to financial stability and independence.
HappyBottom's efforts Mirror Country Club Bank's community-centric mission. Their work to empower families supports a healthier, more thriving community, which is fundamental to our vision of nurturing the area we serve. Together, we can all work toward a future where every family in Kansas City can rise and succeed.
We're banking on you, Kansas City, Country Club Bank, member FDIC.