Jaycina Almond is redefining what support looks like for Atlanta mothers
Jaycina Almond was 20 years old, newly pregnant and paying attention.
She’d grown up in Lexington, Kentucky, where Atlanta was the kind of place you drove to on weekends and came back from with something to talk about. Finally, she decided to stay.
When she found out she was expecting, the financial math felt impossible.
“We were like, how are we going to do this? How are we going to pay for these things?” she recalls.
During her pregnancy, two things happened almost simultaneously.
Her daughter’s father signed a record deal. Suddenly she could birth the way she wanted, stockpile diapers and access care that hadn’t been available to her before. A modeling career followed — campaigns with Gap, Adidas and more, cities on multiple continents, an email list and brand relationships built along the way.
But as she moved through that first year of motherhood, she kept looking around at the women around her. Same age. Same circumstances on paper. Very different realities.
The difference wasn’t effort. It was access.
“I kept thinking — knowing — that luck should not be a differentiating factor on whether we have what we need to live,” she says. “Whether our babies have clean diapers and formula.”
That conviction eventually became the Tender Foundation.
Six years, three programs and a three-person staff later, Almond, now 30, has built one of Atlanta’s most reliable safety nets for single moms living on the margins.
Where she came from
Almond is the oldest of three girls. When her mother had her youngest sister, Jaycina was 15.
“I’ve always felt like a mom,” she says. “I was my baby sister’s second mom.”
Her mother was a single mom and, for much of Jaycina’s childhood, in an abusive relationship she stayed in partly because of financial entrapment. Almond watched that and wanted better for herself and others like her.
Kentucky felt small. She was a kid of the internet, raised on Tumblr, escaping through subcultures, from fashion to social philosophy, she had never encountered in person. Somewhere in the scroll, she learned about modeling — and that Atlanta was six hours away.
“I was too scared to go to New York,” she says. “Atlanta felt like something I could actually do.”
As her fortunes turned during pregnancy, she started asking harder questions about why access works the way it does.
“Statistically, on paper, this is not how my motherhood should look,” she remembers thinking. “We just happened to get lucky and I don’t think luck should work that way.”
While the questions she was asking at 20 eventually became Tender, the organization grew alongside another crisis: the pandemic.
The pivot
The original idea for Tender wasn’t a nonprofit. It was a subscription box kit, curated for each trimester of pregnancy. With every box sold, a box of diapers would go to a family in need.
Almond started testing the concept in 2019 and noticed something quickly: giving away the diapers lit her up. Selling them didn’t.
“I scrapped the whole thing,” she says. “I was like, I’m just going to focus on what makes me happy. And what makes me happy is figuring out how to get money into the hands of moms like me.”
Her new goal was to raise $20,000 in 2020 and redistribute it as emergency bill pay assistance. She filed for 501(c)(3) status, drafted an email and sent it to everyone she knew.
“I just started asking people for money,” she laughs.
Families needed diapers delivered. Families needed grocery store gift cards rather than food pantry boxes because what they actually were lacking was toilet paper, laundry detergent and tampons, items that aren’t covered by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or the federal supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children, known as WIC.
“The choice was finally, solidly, in our families’ hands,” Almond says.
Then and now
Today, Almond’s work addresses a reality many Atlanta mothers know well.
According to a recent study conducted by Kindred Futures, a person born into poverty in Atlanta has a 4% chance of escaping it in their lifetime.
The median household income for a Black family in the city, based on data gather by the U.S. Census Bureau, is $28,105, compared with $83,722 for a white one.
Research consistently points to the stabilizing factors that can make all the difference: steady income, reliable childcare, accessible housing. The kind of things a missed utility payment, a childcare shift gap or an empty gas tank can dismantle in an afternoon.
The math Almond was doing at 20 is the same math Atlanta’s mothers are still doing today.
Since 2020, Tender has raised more than $1.1 million in contributions. The organization has served more than 2,000 families and distributed more than 3,600 diaper and baby wipes drops.
Numbers that mean not just growth but staying power.
“Six years in, we know what we’re doing,” Almond says. “We know why we’re doing it. Now we can just focus on doing the work.”
Building Out Loud
Tender runs three programs that reflect the same belief: Families know how to make their money work.
Get out of the way.
The Bridge is Tender’s long-term investment — 25 Black single mothers receive $500 a month for a full year, no strings attached. Bridge families have purchased cars, invested in their own businesses and hired neighbors.
They’ve gotten out of what Almond calls “the catch-up, keep-up, rob Peter to pay Paul” cycle.
“When you have something long term, there’s this domino effect,” she says. “Folks are actually able to get some steady footing.”
The Dignity Fund addresses the acute.
When a family needs help now — a utility shut-off, a rent gap, an empty tank — the Dignity Fund delivers a one-time, no-strings cash transfer of $500 to 10 families a month, selected by lottery.
The Diaper Bank keeps running year-round, its supplies reaching families across metro Atlanta through a network of volunteer drivers who make drops each weekend.
Almond says her next goal is a mobile diaper pantry truck, so no family goes without because a volunteer wasn’t available.
Tender’s office is on Atlanta’s Southside, and Almond knows exactly what the city looks like from there.
“It’s not the Black mecca for the folks we serve,” she said. “The folks who made this city what it is are struggling to survive in it. We don’t even have a community hospital on the Southside. That’s the reality.”
Beauty in the work
Almond is a model who talks about poverty. She sells clothing and critiques capitalism in the same week.
“I have to let that be the contradiction,” she says. “Or maybe it’s not a contradiction at all.”
The modeling career gave her the platform, the email list, the brand relationships, the access to people with social and financial capital. Without it, Tender doesn’t enjoy the scale it has.
She’s made peace with that but holds space for the day-to-day tension.
“Sometimes I just want to opt out of the performance of beauty,” she says.
And sometimes it just happens naturally. Her laundry basket is never tidy. She takes personal Instagram breaks.
“I’ve had to figure out what is a priority and what I’m willing to drop,” she said. “My laundry? Low on the list. My daughter? No. 1.”
The bigger learning is harder to name. She lands on grace. Permission to hold a full life without performing having it all together. To build out loud before the thing is finished or perfectly packaged.
Her own motherhood journey and her nearly 10-year-old daughter have taught her that.
“Watching her come into this life and just be herself has taught me how to be myself,” Almond says. “She’s been the catalyst for everything.”