WestSide Baby board of directors members

Story, photos and video by Jason Grotelueschen
Reporting for West Seattle Blog 

 A festive crowd of supporters gathered Thursday night at the WestSide Baby warehouse headquarters in White Center, to kick off summer in style at A Night Out with WestSide Baby 2025, the organization’s iconic annual fundraiser event and celebration. All proceeds from the event will help the organization provide essential items to thousands of local children and their families.

WestSide Baby was founded in 2001 “in a new mom’s garage” in West Seattle, and celebrates its 25th anniversary next year. The group fulfills an average of 400 orders per week, and in 2024 was able to distribute $3.29 million in diapers, clothing, and essential equipment to families in need.  The organization won the Not for Profit of the Year award last month as part of 2025 Westside Awards from the West Seattle Chamber of Commerce, as we reported here. 

The event on Thursday featured food and drink, music, games, guest speakers, a silent auction and “raise the paddle” fundraising, with attendees getting an inside look at WestSide Baby HQ during the festivities:

Organizers emphasize that, yes, providing diapers for kids in need is crucially important to the group’s mission, but they also provide much more than that: think clothing, books, toys, wipes, baby food, car seats and all manner of baby supplies. To that point, taped to the back of every action paddle on Thursday night was a printout of an actual order fulfilled by WestSide Baby just in the past week! One example:

And those paddles were put to good use at the event, with attendees bidding generously to support WestSide Baby’s mission, including this high-participation “raise the paddle” round in which bidders could hold up their fingers to indicate how many boxes worth of size 6 diapers (the group’s most high-demand diaper size) they’d be willing to help buy:

Here is our video of that “raise the paddle” round, which is just one of the many giving levels that attendees participated in, ranging from $45 (the cost of a single box of size 6 diapers) to $5,000, with multiple levels in between. Organizers also announced that someone had also made an anonymous donation of $10,000 to the cause, bringing cheers from the crowd.  The silent auction and raffle were big hits, too, with organizers announcing the lucky winners as bidding concluded. The emcees for the evening were WestSide Baby board members Amy Biancofiori (with the paddle in the photo below) and Nicole DeCario:

Here’s Decario with executive director Allie Lindsay Johnson, at right:

During the program portion of the evening, Allie Lindsay Johnson thanked attendees for coming and for supporting WestSide Baby throughout the year (and for so many years):

The group then invited some of its key partners to share their “community stories” and personal anecdotes, starting with Madeline Jagger from Uptown Square Elementary, who shared her own story of growing up in need and emphasizing how crucial the organization is:

Next up was Angel Perez from Akin, a Washington organization that supports children and families and works closely with WestSide Baby. Perez said the work being done provides basic needs to families that otherwise wouldn’t have those needs met, which “allows caregivers to focus on nurturing, caring, educating and allowing kids to be the best they can be.”

Finally, was Angela McCann who teaches at Roxhill Elementary and said she has been involved with the group since nearly the beginning, noting that things “came full circle” because when she was pregnant with her son (who is now 23) she received services from WestSide Baby (and her son now works to support foster families in the area):

She also put in a special plug asking for the community to support the organization’s efforts to provide car seats for families (this became a challenging thing to get, during the pandemic, and remains a challenge). She said that, along with diapers, car seats are among the top financially prohibitive items of need for young families.

Attendees at the event enjoyed food and drink, including offerings from Jack’s BBQ, High On Tacos, Sweet Treats, and Sleight of Hand Cellars:

Attendees also enjoyed a variety of games, including a “wine ring toss” and darts, inside and outside the warehouse:

As the event concluded, organizers thanked attendees for their ongoing support and expressed gratitude to the community, pledging that the best is yet to come! (You can help WS Baby any time of year by going here.)