Donate
Emilie de Brujin, Hartlepool Baby Bank Founder and Senior Community Lead at the Baby Bank Alliance, shares her story of setting up her baby bank and what she has learnt along the way.
Where did the idea for the Hartlepool Baby Bank come from?
Just imagine three ladies seeing items swapped back and forth at a breastfeeding support group, hearing one person lament they needed X, and another saying, “I have one you can borrow”. That was January 2019, and a mere four weeks later we launched Hartlepool Baby Bank.
At the beginning we had no budget and used a free community centre for four hours once a week, which involved one hour of setting up, a two-hour session and one hour of packing away as everything had to go back in our cars at the end of the day. We had no storage, everything was in our homes. We asked our family and friends for any pre-loved donations and asked our wider community on Facebook for support. We funded our first nappies and wipes from that.
How did you get your baby bank off the ground?
Our baby bank was incredibly lucky to be contacted by a journalist who heard about us from our first session and came to record us for our local radio. A local man called Brian driving to work one day heard our appeal for help. Brian worked at a Tesco Distribution Centre, and he proposed to his manager that they came along to help us. That spawned a £100 donation and several boxes of blankets, ready for our second session. Importantly, this also led to a long-term two-year working relationship with Tesco.
The £100 donation turned into our first storage unit, with a commitment that we’d pay for the storage ourselves if we had to in order for our homes to not become a baby bank. Thankfully Hartlepool Baby Bank has always had the funds to cover storage, and it was only during the Covid pandemic that the baby banks ran from our homes to enable the service to run.
In our first week we had six mums and dads, by the second week it became 12, and it grew to a steady 30 or so self-referred families per week. Some families came back for nappies or just the chance for a brew while one of our volunteers kept an eye on their little one. We set a rule: we can watch your little people in the same room as you, but you are still responsible for the wellbeing of your little ones during this time.
Our only collection point was at our local Waste Collection Centre who kindly set up an area for us within their office and tried to rescue items for us where possible.
To increase awareness of our baby bank we emailed all the professionals and statutory agencies in our areas, such midwives, schools, and libraries. However, at this stage very few viewed us as a valuable service to support families.
In our baby bank we set up the space and tables like this:
What mistakes did you make? What improvements would you make if you could do it again?
If we could do it again, we’d slow down the launch, and definitely try to get more professionals on board with our baby bank at the start. We should have visited them, however, the community centre gave an interview to the local newspaper about our baby bank launch before we even knew we were launching!
We needed money for storage and a definite plan in place for removing the rubbish – we didn’t expect people to give so generously, nor did we expect people to give so many things we sadly couldn’t use.
We also quickly realised that our plan to support families with children aged 0 to 2 wasn’t going to work, and we soon became a 0 to 3-year-old service to account for smaller toddlers who couldn’t walk far and needed a pushchair, or bigger toddlers who needed size 2 to 3 clothing.
What was the next big change or set back in your development?
In a word – Covid! Up until this point we were growing well through foodbank, church and self-referrals. Then Covid struck. Then came the dilemma, now what do we do?
We had to shut our community centre sessions down. We couldn’t visit our storage unit so we packed as much of the baby bank as we could and took it back to my house, said goodbye and for a few months Hartlepool Baby Bank was a one-person operation.
Doorstep deliveries were born. We delivered nappies, wipes and baby food to isolating parents, and clothes when one season turned into another and growing babies just couldn’t squeeze into those sleep suits any longer. At the time we were doing about 50 doorstep deliveries a week.
As restrictions eased, we set up a pop-up baby bank from the boot of a car in a local church’s car park. The church was operating its soup kitchen outside, so we came to join them and around 60-70 families a week came for nappies, wipes, food and sanitary items. If pre ordered, we tried our best to supply clothes.
It was getting harder as people couldn’t donate to us, so we had to start accepting clothing only donations at the car from people who were already visiting the soup kitchen or us (remember the time of no unnecessary journeys?).
These BBC articles explain a more about how we operated during the covid pandemic:
How did you recover from Covid?
We recruited more volunteers and benefitted from the grants we’d been able to receive as part of Covid funding. That funding allowed us to improve our building but more importantly gave us time to apply for more grants to literally keep the roof over our heads.
We now have a team of around 12 volunteers at any one time, usually made up of our service users.
Now, we are open to the public three sessions a week for 4 hours at a time, and also provide an emergency service outside of this time.
Is there anything else you need to do to remain sustainable?
For us, it’s definitely important to keep regular time aside for grant applications. We made a fundraising plan for the year, and we try to apply for a few each quarter (deadlines allowing).
We are active on social media and appeal on our Facebook page for items we are short of or extra volunteers, as appropriate.
We have held a few small fundraising events, but mostly find people hold them themselves and then donate the money to us through activities like sponsored runs, walks or reads.
We made sure that we signed up for Gift Aid and GASDS (Gift Aid Small Donation Scheme) so that we could recoup the additional 25p from HMRC per £1 donated to our baby bank. This has been around the £1-2,000 mark a year and grows year on year.
If you’d like to ask any questions about starting a baby bank or any of the points raised above, please contact Emilie, Senior Community Lead at the Baby Bank Alliance – [email protected]