The Asian American Center on the Golden Mile was busy Saturday as families came to collect items such as diapers, clothes and formula at a monthly "diaper drop."
“Diapers aren’t covered under a lot of programs for funding, and it’s very expensive,” said Andrea Cordell-Proper, project manager for the Asian American Center’s maternal child health and Minority Outreach Technical Assistance group, which is part of the Maryland Department of Health.
About 65 families partook in the event.
“If we can, on the hierarchy of needs, if we can take care of the fundamentals, as I say, from the bottom up, then the parents feel more secure, they are able to think past just the basic needs and look at some other things within the home, but also it’s easier to look at better nutrition, job, things like that when you know that you’re child has diapers and wipes, they’re not sitting in a wet diaper,” she said.
Within the Asian American Center, which helps people of all backgrounds, there is a specific umbrella called maternal child health, which is mothers and children, typically up to age 5. Under that umbrella, the center has a grant from Minority Outreach and Technical Assistance that specifically helps with education, mentorship and postpartum support.
“However, our community need is so great that our grant is only about 25 percent of the total MCH population,” Cordell-Proper said. “The majority of the people here, we’ve incorporated in some sort of education or information or we’ve rolled them into our food drop or our ESL program or something so that we know that they’re getting more than a handout, it’s a hand up.”
While diapers may be a basic item, Cordell-Proper said the giveaway helps build trust with the people they help, and those people come back and spend the time to learn jobs and other skills like finance and budgeting.
“We find it’s a way to help them to build trust and to get them feeling comfortable in our space,” she said. “Because we do have a mixed population of people that come. So some are documented, some are not. We have every language that you can imagine. There’s about 35 different languages of people that come here, so it really is all inclusive, in terms of who’s welcome.”
People will fill out an enrollment form so the center knows what services they need and can make sure they’re connected to and aware of other programs in the county that can help them.
“Because it can be very difficult if you don’t have transportation, if you have language issues, if you have education barriers or maybe you only went through 3rd to 6th grade -- even in your own language -- things like, ‘Oh, go to the website and fill out the form,’ can be extremely overwhelming,' Cordell-Proper said. "So even within our program, we directly connect them to a representative in their language at the health department who walks them through their application online and gets them started."
Cordell-Proper said a huge part of the donations come from the Birthing Circle, another Frederick County organization. She said they make a post on the Birthing Circle website about things the center needs and Frederick families “instantly come together.”
The people who receive these essential items are so grateful, she said.
Services like the diaper drop are partially funded by efforts like the United Way of Frederick County's Unity Campaign, which begins March 10.
“The Unity Campaign is huge, because if we don’t have donations like that we can’t do these diaper drops,” Cordell-Proper said. “It’s more than diapers. It’s health care. It’s education. It’s everything that we do here …”
March 07, 2021 at 12:35AM
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Asian American Center diaper drop helps community from the bottom up - Frederick News Post
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