Family Resource Center at LSA

As a continued commitment to Baby Buggy´s mission of providing New York City´s families living in poverty with critical baby gear and baby items to help improve the safety and well-being of their children, Baby Buggy launched its second Family Resource Center in August 2008 at Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service (LSA) in East Harlem.

Baby Buggy is committed to serving the 150 families enrolled in the Home-based Child Development program by providing them with regular, repeat donations of critical gear, diapers, clothing, as well as other essential baby supplies to help improve the safety and well-being of the children Since the launch in August 2008, Baby Buggy has distributed 128,252 essential baby items to client families enrolled in the Baby Buggy Family Resource Center at LSA.

The following is a testimonial from Heather Mitchell, Director of the Home Based Child Development Program at LSA:

"LSA provides the poorest and most vulnerable families in East Harlem with an integrated array of health, social, educational, advocacy and crisis services. Baby Buggy donations have been extremely valuable to the families we serve. These needed items have helped to reduce parental stress and have helped to focus parents more on creating a healthy and safe home environment for their children.

Our program serves 150 families living in poverty at a time. In most of these families, the fathers are working at jobs that pay them below minimum wage and the mothers are staying home with the young children. Many are living doubled or tripled up in tiny apartment spaces where the whole family shares the beds they have. Food, clothing, and rent are the families´ priorities, leaving little funds for anything else; often the family income doesn´t even cover those three basic needs which is why we often find families bringing in eviction notices due to their inability to keep up with the rent.

When we can offer a family a crib, something for which they could not otherwise allocate their limited funds, we are giving them the opportunity to provide a safe sleeping space for their child, as well as more comfort and privacy for the parents. We find that families who are often hard to track down for appointments are showing up regularly when the Baby Buggy diapers arrived because they fulfill a basic need. When those basic needs are taken care of, parents are more able to be engaged in looking at their children´s emotional needs. The relief on their faces when they receive these needed items and the consistency with which families have shown up at the agency to retrieve the donations are alone good indicators of the impact these donations have on the families.

Baby Buggy donations have also helped to deepen client families´ connection to workers who are linking them to a resource they so greatly need. They have also strengthened these families´ connections to the agency as a whole. When the families see that, on top of offering them critical services and support, our agency recognizes their primary struggle of providing for their children´s basic needs and that we are working to help them do this as well."


If you are interested in supporting the Baby Buggy's work with Little Sisters of the Assumption program, please click here