PramDepot in a pandemic
This year has brought so much upheaval to so many organisations and the people they support, and PramDepot is no exception. Recently, Oonagh interview PramDepot’s Director, Karen, about the experience of supporting vulnerable mums and babies throughout the crisis.
O: What was PramDepot doing before the pandemic?
K: Before the pandemic, we were visiting two mum and baby groups up to twice a month and providing everything that a mum requested. We had a bespoke service for about 25 organisations. We also did home deliveries of everything a mum needs, from a buggy, right the way though to nappies and wet wipes. Most of it was recycled and passed on. All of this was with the help of our wonderful volunteers, who would come to the office to sort donations and to the mum and baby groups to deliver items.
O: What were the early days of the pandemic like?
K: When we had lockdown, obviously no one could come into the office, including me. All the groups that we worked with closed down immediately and a lot of the referrals stopped coming in because everyone was in strategy mode. Everyone was trying to figure out how they were going to work as organisations under lockdown.
The main reason why it was so hard for everyone was we all knew there were still women out there who needed stuff, and probably needed it even more now, because it was really hard to purchase baby items. All the shops were shut lots of women we support don’t have internet access so they couldn’t order things online. Lots of the places that were open stopped selling baby clothes straightaway, so women couldn’t buy items from the places they would normally go to if they had any money. Nappies were in short supply, all the hygiene products were in short supply. It was really, really difficult right at the beginning.
O: What changes have you had to make to the way PramDepot works?
K: At the beginning, I was thinking, “Right, well what are we going to do now?”
We started using these Baby Boxes that we’d been given a while ago by Baby Box Company in the US (this is an interesting story I’ll tell in a future newsletter!), and came up with the Emergency Baby Box scheme. It was a way to get all the essentials to mums with the limited resources and space we had.
So we moved PramDepot to my sitting room and that became a mini PramDepot. I did a call out to all the local baby groups in Tottenham, put a plastic container in my garden so people could drop things off, and we just got inundated with stuff! We started a Crowdfunder and we raised £10,000 in the first few weeks. We applied for various grants we were successful in a few of those.
We now have a strategy of just delivering Emergency Baby Boxes to women and providing everything they need until the baby is three months old. We’re signing new people up all the time and we will hopefully soon be supporting as many women as we were before the pandemic.
We’ve also partnered up with Little Village, an organisation similar to us, who take a lot of the larger items that we can’t put in the boxes, like buggies and cots. We pass these onto Little Village to go out to women.
O: What has the response from the community been like?
K: The community response has been amazing and the thought people put into donations is really touching. Before the pandemic, we would get bin liners full of stuff that we would have to sort through and that sometimes wouldn’t be clean, which was really difficult as we don’t have our own washing machine. Now we just deliver the Baby Boxes, it’s much clearer to people what we need, so we get bags where everything’s freshly washed and organised, with a packet of nappies or something and everyone puts in an effort. We’ve been inundated with stuff and it’s amazing.
During the first lockdown, we emptied PramDepot and gave all the stock we had to Little Village because we couldn’t distribute it. Now it’s full again!
O: How has the pandemic impacted the women PramDepot supports?
K: It’s been so, so hard for the women we support. It’s hard enough for people who have access to TV and news and friends who can provide information and support. But if you’re living in a room, in a hostel with hundreds of other people, rumours going round, people not wearing masks… a lot of the people we support are really, really frightened and really, really isolated. They can’t go to church, they can’t go to mother and baby groups, they’re not getting one to one antenatal appointments, you know, it must be terrifying.
Quite often, I’ll turn up with a Baby Box and I’m the first person the woman has spoken to in weeks. And this is a mum who’s just about to give birth, not even really knowing if she’ll be allowed to have anyone at the hospital with her.
I think this pandemic has hit people like the women we support so hard in comparison to others. When they say, “It’s a level playing field”, it’s not a level playing field. This hasn’t levelled it out for everyone, at all. People at the bottom are suffering so much more and struggling so much more than people like me. We are not all in this together.
O: What’s next for PramDepot?
K: One thing I think is really important for people working in this sector is I think we have to start challenging funders about the way they want people to keep changing what they do and create new projects and this, that and the other. I think we need find things that work and then campaign for the funding to make the things that work happen.
Sometimes I worry that we’re making it easier for the government to abandon people. As well as supporting people, we need to campaign to change the policies that make them so vulnerable. Most of the people who get support from baby banks are on Universal Credit, and that’s really shocking. The fact that women have to live on such miniscule amounts of money. It’s just awful.
From now on, PramDepot is going to specialise in supporting mums with newborns, with the Emergency Baby Boxes. We’re also going to become a referring organisation for babies above three months referring women and their babies to other organisations that can support them. Once the lockdown lifts, we will start providing buggies again – we have to carry on giving out prams otherwise we’ll have to change our name!