Turrell Fund Provides $17,500 to Purchase Safe Cribs in Northern New Jersey
Montclair, NJ (PRWEB) February 05, 2015 -- Keeping Babies Safe (KBS), a non-profit organization that promotes safe sleeping practices, can now purchase cribs for low-income families in Essex, Passaic, Union, and Hudson counties through a $17,500 grant from the Turrell Fund.
The grant money will be used to support “Project Safe Crib,” in which KBS purchases cribs that meet the highest safety standards and donates them to low-income families. The cribs are brought to the families’ homes and set up by staff members at participating health and human services agencies. All families receiving cribs are educated about safe-sleep practices for their babies.
“Without the support of such generous supporters as the Turrell Fund, KBS would not exist,” said Joyce Davis, president and founder of the organization, who lost her four-month-old son to a preventable crib accident. “Because of the commitment of the Turrell Fund to our youngest children, we can be assured there will be 115 babies sleeping in cribs with the safest cribs available on the market.”
Since 2007, KBS has donated more than 8,000 safe cribs nationwide. With every $125 donation, the non profit can purchase a crib complying with the latest federal safety standards.
Davis said cribs are the leading cause of death and injury among all juvenile products. In the last two years, there were 148 infant deaths associated with cribs and baby mattresses. The majority of deaths are from adding extra bedding/supplemental mattresses in the crib. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that there are about 20 million unsafe cribs in the United States either being used or are being stored for future use.
Davis said a major focus of KBS is to educate new parents about the dangers of supplemental mattresses in soft-sided play yards. While such mattresses are advertised as being suitable, they can put a baby at risk of suffocation.
Since 2003, KBS has urged Congress to enact federal legislation requiring safe crib standards. As a result, new standards for safe cribs were included in the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008. The law went into effect nationwide on June 28, 2011 and the name of Davis’ late son, Garret, was included in the bill. All new cribs now meet important safety standards; day care centers and other public facilities cannot use cribs that do not adhere to the new standards.
KBS is now working to pass a federal law that would ban the sale of supplemental mattresses for play yards and create a new standard and warning labels that would prevent consumers from using supplemental mattresses with a soft sided play yard. In addition, KBS is working to pass a federal law that would require hospitals and birthing facilities to provide new parents with information on crib safety.
Jonathan Jaffe, Jaffe Communications, +1 (973)315-0300, [email protected]
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