The boxes of Huggies and Pampers are piled high next to Sam Dov’s barber chair. He jokes that whenever a new batch arrives, stacking them feels like playing Jenga.

Since mid-May, Dov, who works at Faded Barbershop in north Lincoln, has been swapping haircuts for donations of diapers and baby wipes. The process is simple: Bring in $40 worth before the end of June and get two haircuts in exchange. Dov said the goal is to collect $10,000 worth — or about 250 donations. He estimates that, as of mid-June, he’d collected about 50 boxes.

Dov is a father of two. But these baby products aren’t for his kids. Instead, he’s collecting them in collaboration with local nonprofit Lincoln Littles, which plans to distribute the diapers and wipes to childcare providers and families across the city. The goal? To make things a little easier for Lincoln parents already grappling with the high cost and limited availability of childcare.

“Everybody judged me at first,” Dov said. “‘You're giving two haircuts for the price of one. How's that work for you?’ And it doesn't work for me. It doesn't have to work for me. It works for the community, though.”

The diaper drive is Dov’s latest effort to improve the lives of children in Lincoln. He’s a member of the Nebraska Early Childhood Collaborative’s parent ambassador program, a yearlong class that trains parents like him to advocate for themselves and their communities, and helped push for the passage of a state law that maintained childcare subsidies for many Nebraska parents. He’s also passionate about creating a welcoming space in his barbershop for autistic children: If your kid has autism, he’ll cut their hair for free.

Despite all his work to make Lincoln a better place to raise a family, Dov is reluctant to be labeled an activist. The title feels too vain and self-serving to him. He’d rather just be known as a good neighbor.

“He's not doing something because it's popular,” said Jess Parker, a longtime friend. “He's not doing something because it's the current fad. He's doing it because he truly cares about his community.”

As a young kid growing up in Lincoln, Dov didn’t have much experience with barber shops. His parents were immigrants from Vietnam, and taking him to the barber felt to them like a needless expense, he said. But as he got older, Dov started to get more conscious about his appearance. He began paying attention to how his friends dressed — and how they styled their hair.

After one of his buddies came to school with an especially cool-looking cut, Dov begged his parents for $40 so he could visit a proper barbershop. They refused. So Dov sold his laptop to a local pawn shop.

“They gave me exactly $47,” he said. “I spent $40 on a haircut, $5 on some snacks and $2 for two cans of Arizona tea. And I was the happiest kid in the world.”

As a teenager, Dov started to go down the wrong path. At 19, he was convicted on drug and firearm charges and spent several years incarcerated. But it was in prison where Dov first learned how to cut hair. Or rather: He told his fellow prisoners that he already knew how to cut hair. Then he taught himself by practicing on them.

“Maybe it was the charisma or the false sense of confidence, but I did it,” Dov said.

After being released on parole in 2021, Dov cycled through a series of different jobs. He worked at a landscaping company, a meatpacking plant, a hair supply store, a bookstore and elsewhere. Sometimes, he was fired or treated poorly because of his felony record, he said. But through it all, he kept cutting hair. If he was behind on his bills or needed grocery money, he’d offer $10 cuts to guys in his neighborhood.

“It came to the point where I'm calling out of work to go cut hair,” Dov said. “I would make more cutting hair on my porch than I would going to clock a 10-hour shift. So that's when I put all my chips in a basket and went to barber school.”

In 2023, Dov graduated from the College of Hair Design in downtown Lincoln. Cutting hair is now his 9-to-5, but it hasn’t stopped being his passion. One of his dreams is to make the barbershop more than just a place where people rush in and out. He wants it to be a community hub — a space where families can get support and resources. His ongoing work with Lincoln Littles is a step in that direction.

Anne Brandt, the nonprofit’s executive director, said Dov strikes her as an authentic and open person.

“He definitely did not hold back,” she said of their first meeting. “(He was) just being very honest about his background and the fact that he had been incarcerated and that he really wanted to change the trajectory of his life.”

After the two appeared together on a Flatwater Free Press panel about Lincoln’s childcare crisis earlier this year, Dov reached out to Lincoln Littles about his idea to trade haircuts for diapers and wipes. It was already the slow season for him, so Dov reasoned he wouldn’t miss out on too much business.

“I'm not making as much as I could be in the peak months, you know?” Dov said. “I'm sitting in a barbershop wasting time anyways. So what could I do to help people out?”

Dov and Lincoln Littles have another collaboration planned as well: an upcoming forum for parents in the community to share their experiences and the challenges they face when trying to find childcare. 

“Sam indicated to us that he often has fathers in his chair who are talking about these difficulties,” Brandt said. “The goal is reaching parents that we wouldn't necessarily have access to.”

Parker, who has known Dov for about a decade, said she has recently seen him gain the confidence to put himself out there and take more opportunities to serve his community. As a former parent ambassador and current mentor with the Nebraska Early Childhood Collaborative, she’s the one who first encouraged Dov to enroll in the program. She had noticed he was already advocating for his own kids and thought it might help sharpen his skills.

“I think that he felt a little nervous to apply because he's like, ‘I don't have a degree. I'm not a childcare provider. I'm just a parent,’” Parker said. “And that is a phrase that eats my soul because no one is just a parent. You wear 10 million hats as a parent.”

There’s one thing Dov is absolutely confident about, and that’s his professional skill. He isn’t afraid to tell you his work is good. But perhaps the best mark of a good barber is that your customers keep coming back.

So do they?

Parker hasn’t gotten a haircut from Dov herself. Two of her three kids have though, and their reviews are glowing.

“They love going to see him,” Parker said. “This afternoon my youngest was like, ‘Can you please call Sam and tell him I need to get my haircut again?’”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/cuts-for-a-cause-meet-the-lincoln-barber-trading-trims-for-diapers/