History

The Story of “Five Ladies & A Forklift”

In 1994 doctors began instructing new mothers to put their babies on their backs to sleep.  This “Back to Sleep” Campaign resulted in a drop in SIDS rates of 50 percent in the U.S., but SIDS remained the number one cause of infant deaths after the first month of age.  Judy Bannon, Executive Director of Sudden Infant Death Services of PA, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit, realized most of the SIDS deaths she was seeing were from lower-income areas and were predominantly African-American infants.  She was wondering if there was a reason that at-risk families were not responding to the Back to Sleep Campaign, when another trend caught her attention:  of these deaths, most were not found in cribs, but on couches or in chairs or adult beds.  Was it possible that these babies were dying for the simple and tragic reason that their mothers couldn’t afford cribs and/or had not been educated about infant safe sleeping practices?

The mission became clear: provide cribs to babies whose mothers could not afford them and educate mothers about the dangers of unsafe-sleep environments.  In 1998 Judy created Cribs for Kids® to do just that.  Today Cribs for Kids® has grown to include more than 300 partners nationwide.

How did Cribs for Kids® grow from an idea to a national crib campaign in 10 years?  Knowing that the faster Cribs for Kids® grew, the more lives we could save, was great motivation.  We developed a Cribs for Kids® Toolkit which includes everything necessary to become a Cribs for Kids® partner and provide this toolkit free of charge to interested organizations.  This allows partners to get up and running quickly, while assuring that a consistent safe-sleep message is being spread throughout the country.

Providing cribs fast and at the best price to our partners is another way we help our partners to succeed.  To this end, we established the Cribs for Kids® Resource Center at our offices on Pittsburgh’s North Shore.  The Resource Center is a warehouse and distribution hub that offers educational materials, portable cribs and other safe-sleep products to partners.  The Pack n’ Play portable crib we sell is specially designed for us by major sponsor Graco Baby Products.  We chose this unit because of its safety record, portability, size, and ease of assembly.  The sheer volume of Pack n’ Plays that we purchase allows Graco to offer them us  at a drastically discounted rate, which we pass on to our partners.

Finding low shipping rates in spite of high oil prices has also been crucial to our program’s success.  Pitt-Ohio Express generously delivers our cribs for free to more than 10 states and donated and maintains our fork lift.  Negotiated shipping discounts from UPS help us keep our prices low throughout the rest of the country.