A baby bank in Thanet hit by a devastating flood

With more people than ever accessing the service, they say it's interrupted their normal flow of donations.  Finn Macdiarmid reports.

Transcript

00:00All of our stock that was on the floor that had been damaged and contaminated and what

00:09were we going to do to replace that because it's months, probably years worth of sorting,

00:15cleaning and donations being given to us.

00:19Multiple cots, high chairs and prams all donated to help struggling families were completely

00:24ruined after a surprise flood had hit the Thanet warehouse where Mama to Mama, the only

00:29baby bank in the district, keep their items.

00:32And it couldn't have come at a more difficult time.

00:34So yeah, the last three months we've had a 40% increase in referrals and we'd had a flurry

00:39of donations, so we had clothing, we had cots, we're running a bed poverty campaign at the

00:45moment because we've been so short of cots and families are needing beds for when their

00:49children go out of side beds, they were all on the floor ready to be put away and they

00:54were all destroyed. So they've all been written off as contaminated. So for us it's a tricky

01:00time because the big ticket items, the prams, the cots, they're difficult to get hold of

01:06because people hold on to them for a long time. So this is where we're struggling now because

01:11we've got a backup of families already waiting for cots and the ones that were ready to go

01:15have now been destroyed.

01:16Now Mama to Mama is in fact the only baby bank that serves Thanet, one of the most deprived

01:21areas of the county. And families rely on the service heavily, whether or not they've been

01:26rehomed or simply struggle with their finances. With the cost of living crisis raising prices,

01:31cots and prams can be especially hard for struggling families to come by. And it's also rarer to see

01:36them donated, meaning when Mama to Mama lost plenty of their cots, it hit them quite hard.

01:41So there's a lot of families, you know, in need of Mama to Mama and the services they offer. So

01:50I think one thing that Jane's noticed as CEO of the organisation is how, you know, there would be a

01:55time when we would be giving the care packages maybe to just mums, families that might be out of

02:01work. But now we're finding increasingly with the cost of living crisis, you might have two parents

02:06working and they're really struggling to provide everything they need.

02:09Mama to Mama say the flood caused an interruption to their normal flow of donations,

02:13but they're concerned that it could happen again.

02:16We need funding now to get additional racking. So we want to ensure everything's off the floor

02:20because there's nothing wrong with the building, but we can't risk another flash flood where it

02:26could happen again. And there's no guarantee that it isn't going to happen.

02:29Until they can get that additional funding, Thanet's only baby bank hope that their warehouse can

02:34stay dry and their donated items can continue to go to the families who need it the most.

02:39Finn McDermid for KMTV in Thanet.