Our Mission
Our Vision
What We Do
Our Values
Our Story
Our Founder
We establish maternity clothing closets as hubs for hyper-local peer-to-peer prenatal support.
We envision a world in which prenatal journeys and maternity clothing are shared for healthier communities and a happier planet.
We operate a clothing closet that keeps approximately 400 pounds of maternity and nursing clothing in circulation annually, serving around 100 local expecting families each year. To date, we’ve also donated about 200 pounds of clothing to nonprofit partners.
We have been able to mobilize this volume of in-kind donations with an annual budget of around $250 and a team of about a dozen volunteers contributing about 100 hours annually.
Community. Building community is at the heart of our work and how we work together. We weave supportive communities for expecting families, thread by thread.
Sustainability. We keep maternity clothing in circulation to reduce waste, and all of our decisions support long-term environmental and financial health.
Teamwork. We have woven Local Maternity Thread together through working together. We know that we can go farther together and that our combined skills and energy are greater than the sum of their parts.
A group of moms who met through a Takoma Families cohort launched Local Maternity Thread in August 2022 to increase local access to maternity clothing and reduce waste. Inspired by neighbors who established food pantries and little free art libraries in their yards during the COVID-19 pandemic, our maternity and nursing clothing closet on Poplar Avenue was a simple solution to keep maternity clothing in circulation.
We equipped a simple garden shed with a clothing rod and storage bins and invited friends to donate the initial inventory of maternity and nursing clothing. After spreading the word about the clothing closet on local listservs and in Facebook groups, we were delighted to see neighbors visiting the clothing closet nearly every day to donate and browse the clothing options.
Neighborhood volunteers and a constant stream of donations have kept the clothing closet stocked (and often overflowing!) for the past 2.5 years. We began hosting periodic clothing giveaways, set up a website for outreach, and held a mini fundraiser to purchase a new sign.
In 2025, we partnered with two DC nonprofits, Mamatoto Village and Community of Hope, to stock their maternity clothing closets with surplus donations on a quarterly basis.
Looking ahead, our vision is to support expecting families beyond clothing provision. Much like the peer-to-peer support we enjoyed via the volunteer-led Takoma Families cohort, we envision a world in which prenatal journeys and maternity clothing are shared for healthier communities and a happier planet. This year, we will conduct a needs assessment for prenatal support and develop and implement a pilot community support group.
Finally, we view our Poplar Avenue clothing closet as a proof of concept that we can scale in the DC region and beyond. By the end of 2025, we aim to establish one additional maternity and nursing clothing closet and secure funding to expand regionally in 2026.
During both of her pregnancies, Amy Leo was among the 1 in 5 women who struggle with perinatal anxiety. A season of life that should have been joyous and exciting was instead dark and terrifying. Of the many challenges she faced during her pregnancies, finding maternity clothing felt unnecessarily challenging, tiring, and wasteful. After her second child was born, she resolved to turn her struggle into a solution for others and organized neighbors to help her launch Local Maternity Thread.
Amy has lived in Takoma Park for nearly 5 years and has 14 years of experience leading strategic communications and organizational learning projects in the nonprofit, higher education, and federal government sectors. Most recently, she provided organizational learning and training support for USAID.
When Amy lost her federal government job in January 2025, she found herself with more time to realize her vision of making Local Maternity Thread’s clothing closet a hub for not just clothing, but hyper-local peer-to-peer prenatal support. She also envisioned scaling the model throughout the DC area and beyond and assembled a steering committee to help develop and implement a two-year plan for Local Maternity Thread.
Our 2025 Goals
Maintain and improve positive “take a thread, leave a thread” experiences.
Get more clothes to people who need them.
Build hyper-local prenatal support hubs.
Prepare to scale in 2026.