Finnish-Style Baby Boxes Get a New York Twist

Two weeks before his election as mayor, Zohran Mamdani held about the cutest press conference you can imagine: Surrounded by babies, and backed by a blue climbing structure, he announced that he would launch citywide “baby baskets,” welcoming the 125,000 babies born in New York City each year with a free collection of essential supplies. Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who sponsored a pilot program of 500 “Born in Brooklyn” baby boxes in 2022, introduced Mamdani, saying, “This is a sacred act to have a baby … We want to make sure the last thing you are thinking about is a box of diapers.”

Left unmentioned was the fact that, just a week earlier, Mamdani’s onetime opponent, sitting Mayor Eric Adams, had launched his own baby box program at four of the city’s public hospitals — two in the Bronx, one in Brooklyn, and one in Queens — where more than 7,000 babies are delivered each year. The cost of the NYC Health + Hospitals program is $2.6 million for year one, funded through city tax dollars. The boxes themselves are provided by Welcome Baby USA, a nonprofit organization founded by Sarah Gould Steinhardt in 2019 that had already been providing a smaller number of care packages to Jacobi Medical Center, one of the Bronx launch sites.