How Baby2Baby stepped up as LA wildfires raged

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

Jeff Berman: Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. This week we’re sharing my conversation with the incredibly impressive co-CEOs of the not-for-profit Baby2Baby.

From day one of the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles at the start of the year, Baby2Baby was on the ground providing essential items to families in dire need. Disaster relief is just part of the support that Baby2Baby provides under Norah Weinstein and Kelly Sawyer Patricof’s leadership. In partnership with not-for-profits around the country, they’ve now distributed more than 250 million diapers and they now serve over a million families across the United States each and every year. We gathered recently for a Masters of Scale Live event in Los Angeles, presented by our partners at Capital One Business, to talk about how Kelly and Norah have scaled Baby2Baby and what it was like to face a disaster in their hometown.

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BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale. Kelly, Norah, 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. The fires 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. I want to take us back to January 7th. Where was each of you when you first heard about the fires?

Copy LinkResponding to disaster in your own community

WEINSTEIN: The news obviously started unfolding slowly. I was talking to colleagues. I 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. 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. 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.

BERMAN: Kelly, where were you?

PATRICOF: I was sadly in bed with the flu on the fire relief huddles on Zoom and 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 backs. 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.

What was so amazing was that the community came together and Baby2Baby became this kind of hub of what can we do? How can we help? We’ve never had volunteer sessions so full of people beating down our doors to come. There were hundreds of people multiple times a day coming and wanting to help. Many of the people who came had lost their own homes. They just would cry and say, “I want to do something. I don’t know what else to do. I just want to help.” People are putting together fire relief packages for children and families who’ve lost everything. 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.

BERMAN: 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?

PATRICOF: 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.

BERMAN: How do you know that? Is there data telling you that? Is it because you’ve got partners? Where’s that coming from?

WEINSTEIN: Right. It’s because 14 years ago when the two of us took over the leadership of Baby2Baby and built what Baby2Baby 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. What that means is we’ve been building for 14 years a network of organizations in Los Angeles and all over the country.

Speaking about Los Angeles, we have a program team that is working with hospitals, foster care agencies, homeless shelters, schools, community resource centers, and 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. 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’ve gone here,” or we know the principal at this school, so we’re going to know who to contact. We were able to activate very quickly.

BERMAN: Kelly, help us understand the scope and scale of what the relief efforts required and what Baby2Baby did in that moment.

PATRICOF: I think we have this huddle in the morning. It’s 9:00 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 Baby2Baby, and we’re going to serve families. Here are the top needed items, and it’s diapers, formula, baby food.” 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.

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. Imagine being in that moment and being a mom or dad and being like, “Okay, but what about my kid? What am I doing?” 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.” We did pop-ups around the city. We were sending truckloads of items. Then we had our thousand partners sending in requests saying, “Okay, this is what we need in this moment.” What we always do at Baby2Baby is we ask and listen. In those moments we’re asking what is needed, not just imagining what people might need, but making sure we’re asking and listening.

We had this incredible outpouring of support from the community and our corporate partners are a lifeline and they were donating millions of items from hygiene items to diaper bags and clothes and just people were being so, so generous.

Copy LinkTurning passion into purposeful action

BERMAN: Let’s go back 14 years. Very few people know what Baby2Baby is 14 years ago. How did the two of you come in to lead the organization?

PATRICOF: Well, I was a model and I lived in New York and Norah was a lawyer and lived in New York. In fact, I hate to give him credit, but I will, my father-in-law introduced us.

BERMAN: He set the two of you up?

PATRICOF: Yes. He set the two of us up because we’d both moved from New York to LA. We went to dinner and we were talking about our next phase in life and what we wanted to do. 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. 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. It was sort of this thing that inspired me, I want to work with kids, I want to do something to help.

Norah 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. We sort of met and bonded over this. It didn’t happen right away, but we were like, “Maybe we should start something.” We started meeting with nonprofits in LA to sort of see what the need was, what was missing. We didn’t want to start something just to start something.

Everywhere we went, we were so shocked. It was like, “You know what we don’t have? We’re doing these services. We aren’t able to provide diapers.” Everyone kept saying diapers, diapers. We were like, “What? Diapers? That’s so interesting.” Now we know that one in two families in America are struggling to afford diapers for their children. People are choosing between food and diapers for their babies. But at that moment, we really didn’t know.

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. 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.”

BERMAN: 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. 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.” What was the inflection point where you said, “This actually has to be a thing. 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?

WEINSTEIN: It was the two of us, and we had one intern and we were sitting in this 600 square foot tiny space on Pico Boulevard and collecting gently used items from the community. Maybe your baby would outgrow that size two diapers and you might drop off one or two packs. That was sort of the beginning of it all.

We were sitting there and we were like, “Let’s announce that Baby2Baby is the two of us and we’re doing something and we see a vision for it.” 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. Luckily we had invited Jessica Alba and Nicole Ritchie. They ended up coming.

BERMAN: As one does.

Copy LinkLearning to say yes and adapt quickly

PATRICOF: We do live in LA. I don’t know. They came and a photo ran in US Weekly and it said, “The Baby2Baby event.” We’re sitting in our little 600 square foot space and we got a phone call and it’s Edelman PR (for Huggies). They’re like, “Hi, we saw your photo on 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.” We were like, “What?”

At that point, we’d had $2,000 and two packs of your diapers maybe you dropped off. We were like, “Okay, yeah, we’d love to do an event with you. Sure.” They’re like, “Can you just repeat what you did?” We’re like, “Yeah, great. We’ll do it.” They’re asking us like, “Do you accept pallets?” We’re like, “Yes.” We’re like, “What is a pallet?” Googling what is a pallet? Then they’re like, “Do you have forklifts?” We’re like, “Of course. We have so many forklifts.” I’m like, “How do you rent a forklift?”

We just sort of started, we were saying yes to everything, and 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. We got on it with our intern, unloaded ourselves.

WEINSTEIN: Without a forklift.

BERMAN: No forklift.

PATRICOF: No forklift. We did not have one. We didn’t rent one either. We unloaded them. The truck driver was really nice. Thank God he helped us. Those diapers flew out the door in one day.

BERMAN: Wow.

PATRICOF: It was like, “Wow, we’re really onto something.”

BERMAN: How is that possible? Because you weren’t scaled at that point. All of a sudden you have this deluge.

WEINSTEIN: Because when the need is that dramatic, people show up.

BERMAN: Wow.

WEINSTEIN: 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 until they were totally full and they tied them to the tops of their cars. 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.

BERMAN: I love this moment of yes, sure, pallets, forklifts, all of it. Every startup, every entrepreneur knows this feeling of like, “Oh my God, I just have to say yes. 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 at a product and the demand is still there.

WEINSTEIN: Right.

BERMAN: What happens the next day?

WEINSTEIN: I think now we were off. This is kind of what binds the two of us. You hear that 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. We’d have very early interviews of someone saying, “Oh, what’s the goal?” We’d be like, “To provide every child in the world with diapers and basic essentials.” It was kind of like, that’s silly to say. We were like, “Okay, you can think that’s silly.” We had really big hopes for it.

BERMAN: Well, maybe less silly and more audacious.

Copy LinkChoosing partnerships to accelerate scale

WEINSTEIN: Sure. Yes. But I think we didn’t back down from it. We were like, we just gave out 100,000, like “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’ve been much more complicated. Because we weren’t going to ever decide who gets what and how many and what size.

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 that we had established this group is picking up for eight children. This group is picking up for 120,000 children. 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. We could have given out this stuff that way. It was like, “No.” We quickly wanted to go fast and furious and we were like, “We are going to have to do this through organizations.”

BERMAN: Still ahead, how Kelly and Norah learned to leverage LA’s celebrities to explode Baby2Baby’s growth. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel.

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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 Norah to keep scaling.

Copy LinkLeveraging celebrity influence and corporate relationships

WEINSTEIN: 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. We just put a lot of smart women together in the room and kept figuring out the next step.

Some 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. That helped because that provided for some incoming phone calls. 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.” Again, we’re like-

PATRICOF: Yes.

WEINSTEIN: “Yes.” We also then had decisions made based on these things coming in. 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.” This was sort of how we started serving children outside of Los Angeles.  It 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.” 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?” Some of our scaling decisions happened because we get really good phone calls.

BERMAN: It sounds like you effectively built a virtuous cycle where you’d have a celebrity show up that would get some attention, that might lead to a donation. Is that kind of how it evolved?

PATRICOF: Yeah. Part of our job, we would joke sometimes we’re nonprofit CEOs, but we’re also agents. We’re 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. Now we, 14 years later, just got an $8 million grant from Huggies in kind and cash.

BERMAN: Shoutout Huggies.

PATRICOF: It’s sort of like a full circle moment, but we really did see  we can use celebrity to our benefit, and it also makes the celebrity look good. Probably their agents and managers hate us because they don’t get the percentage, but that’s fine. This corporate partner is happy. We get to serve children with the basic essentials that we need for them. It’s sort of like a win-win across the board. Most corporations do need a corporate partner and want to, for their customers, look charitable and want to do that anyway, so it really worked.

BERMAN: 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?

PATRICOF: Partnering as we have from day one with other nonprofit organizations. 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?” Then we’re the person who’s providing that.

I think 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. 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 being spry in these moments is how we’re able to get to the people and make sure that everyone is taken care of.

Copy LinkPlanning events that power nonprofit growth

BERMAN: 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?

PATRICOF: Yeah. I think year one we were like, “I guess we should have a gala. Every non-profit 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.

BERMAN: It’s a lot of money.

PATRICOF: A lot of money. We now raised almost $18 million this year.

BERMAN: In one night?

PATRICOF: One night, yes.

BERMAN: In one night.

PATRICOF: The growth of that has been exciting. But even in that first year, everything’s still kind of 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.”

BERMAN: It’s not a sit down, rubber chicken, and listen to some boring speeches?

PATRICOF: It’s no rubber chicken. It’s not in a hotel ballroom.

WEINSTEIN: No chicken at all.

BERMAN: Right.

PATRICOF: There’s zero chicken. Nonprofits that have those, we love you and we are your partner.

BERMAN: You be you.

PATRICOF: So great. But ours is supposed to be fun, young, exciting. We have 20 chefs from around Los Angeles who come and cook at their own stations. Evan Funke’s making you cacio e pepe, Jon and Vinny are making a lobster roll. Just things are happening and it’s fun. Gwyneth Paltrow’s feeding you an oyster from Found Oyster. I don’t know.

BERMAN: I mean to find a nickel for every time Gwyneth fed me an oyster, I mean sure.

PATRICOF: Sure. It’s great. It’s the best thing ever. We’ve tried to make it something that people want to come to, but as much as people are like, “Oh, it’s the funnest event of the year and you honored Selma Hayek, and Snoop Dog Performed” they’re like, “Don’t you have the best time?” We’re like, “Nope. It’s work for us.” We are there. We are working. This is where we raise 60% of our operating budget. We plan it all year long. Those donations that roll in the night of that are we do a live giving on the stage and whether it’s Nicole Richie and Mindy Kaling and they’re joking and whatever, and we are sitting there like, “Okay.” We plan that and it is part of everything that goes into our 364 days outside of the gala, goes into that night. It is fun and it is something people want to come to. We were proud to be called the Met Ball of the West, so that was cool. But it is work and it is how we fund serving a million children across the country every year.

Copy LinkChanneling advocacy into meaningful policy change

BERMAN: The other angle of your work that I’m not sure people are as familiar with is on the policy front. This is not commentary on what’s happening in America today. This is historically incredibly regressive policies with regard to maternal health, with regard to children in need. I started my career as a public defender in Washington, DC representing children charged as adults. I’ll never forget the first time I walked into a home and I saw a mom feeding a baby with a baby bottle but Coca-Cola and why? Because it’s high calorie and it’s inexpensive. If you can’t afford formula, that’s what you’re going to do because you’re going to feed your kid one way or another.

Could you share a little bit about how you moved into doing policy work and what the focus there has been and where you’ve had some success?

WEINSTEIN: We pride ourselves on being in a very narrow lane. I know there’s leaders of nonprofits and for-profits that want to have as wide a lane as possible, but we really have a narrow lane. The reason we have a narrow lane is that our work is not done. We know there’s this incredible need. We’ve taken on two very specific instances of advocacy because they were so closely tied to our mission and our lane.

The first was the diaper tax. Diapers in many states are taxed and they are taxed like a luxury item. As we always say, anyone who’s ever changed a diaper would not put diapers in the category. There’s nothing luxurious about changing a dirty diaper. Considering diapers are the number one item we distribute and what started this entire movement for us and keeps us up at night, the fact that diapers are taxed felt like something we wanted to go fight against. We did that.

Again, we didn’t have a roadmap. We didn’t have someone to ask for advice. We went and we started with California because we’re here and we started advocating to remove the tax in California. We went up to Sacramento. A few times we brought celebrities because we were just doing whatever we could to try to get attention to get this tax repealed. We gave out all the stats about how one in two families in the United States are struggling to afford diapers, how diapers are the fourth highest expenditure in any low income family’s house after food, rent and utilities, how people can’t drop off their children at daycare unless they have diapers. Moms are not going to work and not going to job interviews because they don’t have diapers.

We explain this all to the governor and the politicians in Sacramento. We lost a few times. Then we flew back to Los Angeles and then we got right back up and we went back to Sacramento. We shifted a little bit and we kept going. Ultimately in January of 2020, diaper tax was repealed for the first time in state history in California. A bunch of other states followed suit. There’s still 25 states to go so we continue to be on that road.

PATRICOF: Another phone call, a great one from the White House in the Biden administration, and they were looking to do a pilot in maternal health and asked Baby2Baby to join them. We picked, along with them, the three states with the highest maternal mortality, piloted that program. Kamala Harris came to announce the partnership at Baby2Baby headquarters.

Since then, that was three states. We’re now in 15 states with Huggies’ help and support. But it’s something that we’re doing because obviously the need is there. We’re seeing the rates of maternal mortality are growing, especially for black women. It’s something that’s really important to us that we see in our work every day.

Mental health is now the number one leading cause of maternal mortality. As soon as that was brought to our attention, we have to do something about it, just like we have to do something about the diaper need. It’s one of those things that sparks something in us that is narrow and in our mission, but something that we know we can get behind, that we can do something about. We have a lot of states left to go, but we’re going to get there.

BERMAN: But Kelly, in these 15 states where this pilot program is now expanded to what’s working to reduce maternal mortality rates?

PATRICOF: Basically, we make these maternal newborn supply kits. It’s 20 items in a kit that you receive right after you’ve given birth to a baby. In those moments, you are obviously vulnerable in so many ways, but if you don’t have basic supplies to take care of yourself and to take care of your baby, then imagine the hopelessness that you feel and the hopelessness that you feel because you need to take care of this tiny person and you don’t have those basic essentials to do it. That is what we’re doing. We’re giving moms in that moment these supplies. It’s not only diapers and clothes and all the things that you need for your newborn baby, but it’s things to take care of yourself because that is also important in those moments. There’s a lot of information inside not only teaching you about those 20 supplies and how to use them for you and your baby, but also in the case of you might be in some sort of health situation where you need help and you need a doctor. There are exactly those instructions also included.

WEINSTEIN: We don’t pretend to be solving the maternal mortality crisis, which has so many sides to it, but we do feel like we’re a real part of it now.

BERMAN: It just strikes me that, and forgive me for trying to be logical here, but so much of what we’re talking about, whether it’s a 20 item kit that’s going home with a new mom along with sort of tips and guidelines, what have you, or it’s just simply saying, “Hey, if a mom’s going to be able to go to work or a job interview, she’s going to be able to drop her kid at daycare or at a relative’s house even with diapers. We need to make sure that they have access to diapers.” These are relatively small dollars invested for potential massive returns in every respect in terms of healthier families and communities, in terms of more productive members of society, all of it. What is stopping us from solving this? Is it the will? Is it the broad understanding that we can do it? Why can’t we get to a point where we don’t need a Baby2Baby because we have fixed these problems?

WEINSTEIN: I feel like we spend so little time with that question intentionally. The problems exist and we are solution-oriented and we need to work side-by-side partners. We of course need the government and the for-profit sector to work alongside us, but I think our thought is while other people figure out why that’s not being solved, we’re going to do our part to solve it as much as we can without that help because it’s not going away. I think we all kind of know it’s not going away completely, but we’re doing these creative things where, in the case of these maternal health kits, does have a government arm, it does have Huggies.

BERMAN: I want to bring us to a close with a handful of sort of rapid-fire quick questions for you. What is one great thing about having a co-CEO?

PATRICOF: Well, I call Norah my lawyer face because there’s many things that I do that might be good, but we may have gotten sued or taken down if it was for me, if it wasn’t for her, because Norah makes sure to dot the I’s and cross the T’s and make sure that we’re always keeping everything on point. I appreciate that as a person who maybe isn’t that way. I think the yin and the yang of us has really benefited Baby2Baby and our partnership wouldn’t have been possible without our different personalities, but our different personalities brings such different things. But the combined combination of the two of us brings everything to Baby2Baby.

Copy LinkKnowing when to say yes and when to say no

BERMAN: One piece of advice you would give to an entrepreneur, again, for-profit, not for-profit, doesn’t matter who’s identified a problem and wants to go solve it?

PATRICOF: I think we’ve said it a million times, but saying yes really worked in our benefit. We said yes a lot in the beginning. We had a lot of incoming support, but we said yes every time and then just figured it out. That’s really how we grew in the beginning.

WEINSTEIN: Then we started saying no. We did say yes for a long time. We still believe in the power of yes, but there are some very difficult times where you have to say no. I think we’ve had to say no when our donors wanted to keep giving us gently used things and we realized that is expensive and not scalable and that someone should do that, but that can’t be this organization where we’re reaching so many people.

I think in a disaster when someone wants to drop off beautiful puzzles, and we have to say right now if you give us puzzles, we can’t get out this water quickly enough. We have had to learn the very hard way because we’re so used to saying yes that you do also have to sometimes say no.

BERMAN: One thing that the hundreds of people here tonight and the hundreds of thousands of people who will listen to or watch this when we release this can do to support your mission?

PATRICOF: Our Instagram is @Baby2Baby with the number two. Our website is baby2baby.org. But I think not only is it donating funds because of course every nonprofit needs funds, but we do love volunteers coming in and helping, as we said. Our maternal newborn supply kits are packed purely by volunteers. When I’m telling you that they are going out to 15 states now, that new moms are receiving these every day, that is because of our volunteer force.

Then I think besides that, corporate partners have been a huge part of how we have grown and these donations of bottles, it’s formula, it’s diapers, but it’s also socks and shoes and clothes. These have really allowed us to distribute half a billion items since we have started. That is really a number one thing. These corporate partnerships and the in-kind donations really go a long way for the children we serve.

WEINSTEIN: Just to add, it sounds cliche, but the idea that in helping us, that there’s no donation too small is really true. I think we almost suffer from a reputation that comes along with our celebrity supporters that we don’t need help or we only need help on such a massive scale. That’s someone sitting in the audience or with a company that doesn’t have $8 million or 8 million diapers that there’s no place for them, but it’s really not true. It’s the 40,000 donors that gave to our fire fund that allowed us to give out the 20 million items in the fires. Any amount of funds, it really does add up and it has led to where we are today.

BERMAN: I love that as a place to bring us to a close, that you have no idea the impact that every small action can have. On behalf of Los Angeles, on behalf of every community that Baby2Baby serves, thank you for the work you do. Thank you for being with us tonight.

WEINSTEIN: Thank you for having us.

BERMAN: Thank for joining us.

PATRICOF: Thank you.

BERMAN: From a scrappy start that nearly every entrepreneur can identify with, Baby2Baby has evolved into a renowned not-for-profit with an enormous impact. Norah’s and Kelly’s story is a valuable reminder that the most essential ingredient for scaling your idea is an unwavering belief that the problem you target is worth solving. Notwithstanding the extraordinary scale that Kelly and Norah have reached, there is so much more to do.

Special thanks to our event team and the team at NeueHouse in Los Angeles. I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.