How Baby2Baby stepped up as LA wildfires raged

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0:39Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com. Upwork.com. Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. This week marks one year since the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles. And as someone who has lived here for nearly 21 years and whose family was affected by the fires, And as anyone who lives here knows, it has just been an extraordinary, devastating experience for us to go through here. And yet, Angelinos are resilient. The city is resilient. People have come together in really extraordinary and beautiful ways to make things better, to help others get through it. It's really the best of who we are.

1:31And two of the people who are among the very best of who we are are baby-to-baby CEOs Nora Weinstein and Kelly Sawyer-Patrickhoff. They lead an exceptional organization that really started with a very simple insight, which was that the resources for new parents to take care of their babies, the most basic resources, diapers, formula, etc., were not getting to them. as Angelenos, they were especially focused on stepping in to address the needs coming out of the fires in Los Angeles. From literally day one of the LA wildfires, Baby to Baby was on the ground providing essential items to families in dire need.

2:20These are two phenomenal human beings, And I had the opportunity to be in conversation with them last year on stage discussing what it was like to face a disaster in their hometown and how they continue to scale their impact, not just in Los Angeles, but around the world.

2:43You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it. Just how you do it.

3:13This is Masters of Scale.

3:20Kelly, Nora, welcome to Masters of Scale. I can't imagine a more fitting and important conversation for us to have on this stage in LA. I've been here for 20 years in LA. It's home for me. And the fires I've had at the top of the year were devastating for, I'm sure, everyone in the room. If you weren't personally affected, someone you love, some member of your family, lost their home, lost their business, lost their community. And so I want to take us back to January 7th. Where was each of you when you first heard about the fires? The news obviously started unfolding slowly. So it was, I was talking to colleagues.

3:58I had friends calling. I live in Brentwood. And Baby2Baby has now responded to 100 disasters. But this one was different because this was our backyard. It was our home. So while we're used to saying, okay, everyone, we're having a huddle. there's a hurricane or this is hitting Texas or this is happening in Florida. This was the manager of our warehouse has now just been evacuated or I was figuring out where my kids were in school and finding out what was happening. So it was so personal from the get-go. We had to kind of juggle dealing with the personal and dealing with the professional, which was our jobs in this moment were to take what we had learned in 14 years and apply it where we're looking out for children and families in disasters and apply all the lessons we've learned into this moment where it probably mattered the most.

4:57Kelly, where were you? I was sadly in bed with the flu on the fire relief huddles on Zoom. And, you know, we're watching each of our employees be evacuated. One of our employees lost their home. Their sister lost their home. They evacuated with their children with just the clothes on their back. So we were really in it in a way we'd never been in it before. But that felt so different to us and personal to us because they're all around us. Not only friends were losing their homes, but also our staff who we care so much about. And what was so amazing was that the community came together and Baby to Baby became this kind of like hub of like, what can we do?

5:39How can we help? We've never had like volunteer sessions so full, people like beating down our doors to come. And there were hundreds of people multiple times a day coming and wanting to help. And many of the people who came had lost their own homes. And they just, you know, would cry and say like, I want to do something. I don't know what else to do. I just want to help. And so people are putting together fire relief packages for children and families who'd lost everything. And it was so scary and sad, but also so inspiring to see LA and the community come together in that moment and to have the space to be able to hold that.

6:16So how did you flip from, we've got to deal with ourselves and our people to we've got to serve the community? How did you transition into that mode? I feel like we have seen it before because through our disaster relief work, we're constantly around people in these other cities who are having similar circumstances. Our team over 14 years has built this expertise and we've built it in 50 states and 300 cities. But in Los Angeles, our team knows this city every inch of it. And we know where children are and we know where the most vulnerable children are. How do you know that? Is there data telling you that?

6:54Is it because you've got partners? Where's that coming from? So it's because 14 years ago when the two of us took over the leadership of Baby to Baby and built what Baby to Baby is today, we've always been a model where we don't serve families and children directly on a regular basis. We've always known that in order to scale, we had to serve partners, serve clients. So what that means is we've been building for 14 years a network of organizations in Los Angeles and all over the country. So speaking about Los Angeles, we have a program team that is working with hospitals, foster care agencies, homeless shelters, schools, community resource centers.

7:40And one by one, we onboarded them to serve them on a regular basis so that we might have a tiny homeless shelter in the valley. and they have eight beds and we know that regularly they need supplies for the rotating eight families that might be coming in and out. Then we also serve the entire Los Angeles Unified School District where we're serving tens of thousands of students who go to school and they're identifying who the students are, who are most in need, who are experiencing homelessness, who might be in foster care, et cetera. We know which shelters to be looking out for to think, well, that shelter must have burned down, so we need to get to these kids, and they probably would have gone here.

8:26Or we know the principal at this school, so we're going to know who to contact. We were able to activate very quickly. Kelly, help us understand the scope and scale of what the relief efforts required and what Baby2Baby did in that moment. I think, you know, we have this huddle in the morning. It's 9 a.m. The whole team is on, and it's every department, and everyone's coming in. We're like, okay, this is what we need to do today. We're going to do a pop-up distribution outside of our own parking lot at Baby to Baby. And we're going to serve families with, here are the top needed items. And it's diapers, formula, baby food.

9:00And people are coming through and they're driving through and we're putting everything in. We're also sending to these shelters that are already housing people who have lost everything. And we're making sure those shelters have everything they need. Because what we know is in these emergencies and in disasters, adults are really sort of the ones that people focus on. And we're there to focus on the babies and children. So if you have lost your home and you're in a shelter and you're a parent, there's no crib, there's no diaper, there's no formula, there's not a toy, not a book, there's nothing.

9:30So imagine being in that moment and being a mom or dad and being like, okay, but what about my kid? What am I doing? So we are there to provide those items. We have 62 members of our team. We're like, okay, we're all going to break up. we're all going to conquer this and we're going to handle it. And so we did pop-ups around the city. We were sending truckloads of items. And then we had our thousand partners sending in requests saying, okay, like this is what we need in this moment. And what we always do at Baby to Baby is we ask and listen. And in those moments, we're asking what is needed, not just imagining what people might need, but making sure we're asking and listening.

10:07We had this incredible outpouring of support from the community and our corporate partners are our lifeline and they were donating millions of items from hygiene items to diaper bags and clothes and just people were being so so generous yeah okay so let's go back 14 years very few people know what baby to baby is 14 years ago how did the two of you come in to lead the organization well i was a model and i lived in York and Nora was a lawyer and lived in New York. And in fact, I hate to give him credit, but I will. My father-in-law introduced us. It set the two of you up. Yes, he set the two of us up because we'd both moved from New York to LA and we went to dinner and we were talking about like our next phase in life and what we wanted to do.

10:54And during my time modeling, when I was in New York and not traveling, I was volunteering at a Head Start center in Harlem where I got to spend time with so many children who couldn't really even focus on their schoolwork or do any of their schoolwork without basic essentials. So there'd be a little boy there with shoes that were three sizes too small, and he couldn't do his math worksheet. Kids that hadn't eaten breakfast, so they weren't able to focus on school. And it was sort of this thing that like inspired me. I want to work with kids. I want to do something to help. And Nora had a similar sort of situation when she was a lawyer working with children and mothers and pro bono work that she was able to do.

11:35So we sort of met and bonded over this. It didn't happen right away, but we were like, maybe we should start something. And we started meeting with nonprofits in LA to sort of see what the need was, like what was missing. We didn't want to start something to start something. Everywhere we went, we were so shocked. It was like, you know what we don't have? You know what? We're doing these services. we aren't able to provide diapers. And everyone kept saying diapers, diapers. And we were like, what? Diapers? That's so interesting. Now we know that like one in two families in America are struggling to afford diapers for their children.

12:11People are choosing between food and diapers for their babies. But at that moment, we really didn't know. And it was so interesting learning from a children's hospital, a homeless shelter, a domestic violence shelter, a school. And it was all across the board, it was the same answer. So it was this question that we asked that we kept hearing the same answer for. And we're like, we can do something about this. So it's one thing to say, we have a shared mission here to then go and meet and gather the data and identify this core problem and decide to do something about. It's another thing to say, we're going to be co-CEOs of an organization and we're going to build something that has the potential to scale to national and potentially even global impact.

12:54So what was the inflection point where you said, this actually has to be a thing, right? We can't just do this by going to our friends and raising some money and maybe talking to a big CPG company and getting some diapers donated. What was the flip point? It was the two of us and we had one intern and we were sitting in this like 600 square foot, tiny space on Pico Boulevard and collecting gently used items from the community. Maybe your baby would outgrow the size two diapers and you might drop off like one or two packs. And that was sort of like the beginning of it all. And we were sitting there and we were like, let's like announce that Baby2Baby is, you know, the two of us and we're doing something and we like see a vision for it.

13:36So we scraped together a little event and asked a friend to donate alcohol, found a free space. We had a publicist friend who got a photographer and we had an event and it was 20 women. and luckily we had invited Jessica Alba and Nicole Richie. They ended up coming. As one does. We do live in LA, I don't know. So they came and a photo ran in Us Weekly and it said the baby to baby event. So we're sitting in our little 600 square foot space and we got a phone call and it's Edelman PR. And they're like, hi, we saw your photo in Us Weekly and we'd love to do an event with you and we'd like to give you$100 ,000 and 100 ,000 diapers.

14:18And we were like, what? At that point, we'd had like$2 ,000 and two packs of your diapers. Maybe you dropped off. And we were like, OK, this. Yeah, I would love to do an event with you. Sure. They're like, can you just repeat what you did? And we're like, yeah, great. We'll do it. So they're asking us, like, do you accept pallets? And we're like, yes. And we're like, what is a pallet? Like Googling what is a pallet? And then they're like, do you have forklifts? And we're like, of course, we have so many forklifts. I'm like, how do you rent a forklift? And we just sort of started, you know, we were saying yes to everything.

14:52And we had this event. We got the$100 ,000. The truck showed up, the biggest truck we've ever seen. We were in heels just like this. And we got on it with our intern, unloaded ourselves. Without a forklift. No forklift. No forklift. We did not have one. We didn't rent one either. And we unloaded them. The truck driver was really nice. Thank God he helped us. And those diapers flew out the door in one day. Wow. And it was like, wow, we're really onto something. How is that possible? Because you weren't scaled at that point. All of a sudden you have this deluge. Because when the need is that dramatic, people show up.

15:28So we made a few calls. We didn't know how this word spread, but they heard the word diapers and they needed them and they showed up in cars and they packed them till they were totally full and they tied them to the tops of their cars. And we watch. It's like if someone needs something and needs it for their baby, they will drive far. They came with their friends. They came after work. They came before work. And word got out. And we could have kept going. When there's something valuable, people show up. So I love this moment of, yes, sure, pallets, forklifts, all of it. Because it's such every startup, every entrepreneur knows this feeling of like, oh, my God, I just have to say yes.

16:07Like, I'll figure it out. I'll build the airplane on the way down. the 100 ,000 diapers, the$100 ,000, but all of a sudden you're out of product and the demand is still there. What happens the next day? I think now we were off. Like this is kind of, I think, what binds the two of us. And you hear that, you know, it's not always the model and the lawyer, and that doesn't necessarily make sense, but we've had this vision of making this huge. And people, you know, we'd have very early interviews of someone saying, oh, what's the goal? And we'd be like, to provide every child in the world with diapers and basic essentials.

16:40And it was kind of like, that's silly to say. And we were like, okay, you can think that's silly. We've had really big hopes for it. Well, maybe less silly and more audacious. Sure. Yes. But I think we didn't back down from it. We were like, we just gave out 100 ,000. Great. What's next? When can we double that? We had to make some key decisions quickly, which gets to the point of scaling and what we were saying before about how we weren't serving individuals. Because I think we realized quickly, if there had been a line of people who needed the diapers themselves, it would have been much more complicated.

17:16Because we weren't going to ever decide who gets what and how many and what size. And we knew if we really wanted to serve the numbers we wanted to serve, we had to have a layer in between where one group could say, you know, that we had established this group is picking up for eight children. This group is picking up for 120 ,000 children. And that was a key decision early because we were like, if we want to just incrementally grow, we can just keep having a few friends in the space and have moms themselves show up. Like we could have given out the stuff that way. And it was like, no, we quickly wanted to go fast and furious.

17:54And we were like, we have to, we are going to have to do this through organizations. Still ahead, how Kelly and Nora learned to leverage LA's celebrities to explode baby to baby's growth.

18:14This is Mike Nicholas, Capital One business customer and co-founder of Ansett Uncles, a plant-based restaurant and community space in Brooklyn, New York. And he's telling us how they started a product line. We already had a space in the community. The food was an extension of our lifestyle and our values. So we know we wanted to create something that was an offshoot to that. Our pepper sauce. That's my grandmother's recipe. That's like a liquid gold, right? If someone wants to approach us and ask us what do we do, we provide flavor. Growing a product line is no small investment, but Mike and his wife and co-founder Nicole were able to manage with the help of their Capital One Business Card.

18:53Working with Capital One Business, we're able to leverage our limits and utilize those points, making sure we can continue the scale at the speed that we needed to go. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards.

19:11You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel. Since it began more than a decade ago, Baby2Baby has given out 250 million diapers. It's a number that they are justifiably proud of, but quick to follow up with this one. This year alone, they've received requests for 1.7 billion diapers. That unrelenting need, that diaper gap, drives Kelly and Nora to keep scaling. Once we started raising the$100 ,000 and then raised a little bit more, we started putting together a team. Our team has always been predominantly women. And we just put a lot of smart women together in the room and kept figuring out the next step.

19:55Some of it happened because of the celebrity. Now there was the next picture of the next celebrity and the next celebrity and the next event. And that helped because that provided for some incoming phone calls. So we'd get a call saying, I own a baby bottle plant or my friend does. And they connected us to them. and we have 126 ,000 extra baby bottles. We heard you could do something with them. And again, we're like, yes. We also then had decisions made based on these things coming in. Like the plant was in Philadelphia and we said, well, don't ship them to Los Angeles. I'm sure there's someone on the East Coast who could use them and we could use some.

20:35And so this was sort of how we started serving children outside of Los Angeles, came from an incoming call where we said, we're getting all of this notoriety from some of our celebrity relationships that's giving us press and attention. But now we can share the wealth when we have excess, let's share it. So instead of saying, let's expand to Philadelphia today, it was really a call that started out saying, why don't we look for an organization that does similar work or could be able to do similar work in Philadelphia or a neighboring city? And I'm sure they can use half those bottles. and then why don't you ship half of the bottles to us?

21:10So some of our scaling decisions happened because we get really good phone calls. It sounds like you effectively built a flywheel. You built a virtuous cycle where you'd have a celebrity show up that would gain some attention, that might lead to a donation. Is that kind of how it evolved? Yeah, part of our job, we would joke sometimes, like we're nonprofit CEOs, but we're also like agents. We're like doing endorsement deals. That first Huggies call, we got 100 ,000 diapers and$100 ,000, our next one, we were like, well, Jen Garner will do it for 5 million diapers and 5 million wipes. And she did.

21:43And now we, 14 years later, just got an$8 million grant from Huggies. Wow. In kind and cash. Yeah. Shout out Huggies. So it's sort of like a full circle moment, but we really did see like, okay, we can use celebrity to our benefit. Also makes the celebrity look good. Probably their agents and managers hate us because they don't get the percentage, but that's fine. And this corporate partner is happy. We get to serve children with the basic essentials that we need for them. And so it's sort of like a win-win across the board. And most corporations do need a corporate partner and want to, for their customers, look charitable and want to do that anyway.

22:27So it really worked. When wildfires hit Maui or a hurricane hits Texas or North Carolina or what have you. When you're talking about the disasters that are hitting these other areas where you don't have infrastructure, how did you figure out how to serve the needs there? Partnering, as we have from day one, with other nonprofit organizations. So we are in there with the Red Cross, with World Central Kitchen. We are side by side. We're popping up if we need to with our disaster relief team. If the Red Cross is like, we've got this, but we don't have the diapers, formula and baby essentials. Can you send them to us?

23:03Then we're, we're the person who's providing that. I think like we're called the Red Cross for kids, which has been a very proud name that we've taken on, but we are that we're trying to be there to serve the children in these disasters and however we have to do it, we'll do it. So if we need to get there with our team and do it ourselves, if there's a partner on the ground that we work with already that is like, send us the stuff and we can distribute it. We're like, great, we'll do it any which way we can. I think like being spry in these moments is like how we're able to get to the people and make sure that everyone is taken care of.

23:39So in terms of the scale of the organization, just picking up on the celebrity thread for a moment, can you talk about the gala and how you built that and how important that is to what you all do, the work you all do? Yeah, I think year one, we were like, I guess we should have a gala. Every nonprofit has a gala. Let's have a gala. We raised$1.1 million and we looked at each other and we were shocked because in that moment, that was so much money. It's a lot of money. A lot of money. We now raised almost$18 million this year. In one night. One night. In one night. And, you know, the growth of that has been exciting.

24:14But even in that first year, the same, like everything's still kind of like the same vibe. We were like, okay, let's make sure that we have an event that is fun, that people want to come to. It's not a sit down rubber chicken. No rubber chicken. It's not in a hotel. No chicken at all. Right. There's zero chicken. Yeah. And, and nonprofits that have those, we love you. And we are your partner. So great. But ours is supposed to be, you know, fun, young, exciting. We have 20 chefs from around Los Angeles who come and cook at their own station. So So Evan Funke's making you like Cacio Pepe. John and Vinnie are making a lobster roll.