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Writer's pictureLena Reiff

Lava Mae - Changing Homelessness one shower at a time.


While working on our designs for the Lawndale neighborhood in Chicago we have highlighted some of the major issues within the neighborhood. One of these issues is the rate of homelessness. There is an increasing number of individuals in the area that are homeless and this rate effects the healthcare that is provided in those areas.


ED's in our country are flooded with individuals that lack a place to stay for the night. Also community jails (as written about in my Cook County Jail blog post) have become areas in which homeless individuals end up due to their lack of housing. For these individuals committing a petty crime is worth having a place to stay for the night. With this being such a large problem nationwide, my design partner (Luz Upegui) and I have been looking into different design potentials that could help alleviate the influx of people coming flocking into the ED for unnecessary reasons. We started to look into how mobile systems could help this community and this is when we found Lava Mae.


Lava Mae is a mobile shower and toilet service founded by Doniece Sandoval in 2013 in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas of California. The idea behind this scheme was to provide basic human necessities to the homeless community in these areas to help them regain back their dignity. It is hard to live a socially normal life when you are not able to have the ability to take a shower or go to a private bathroom. What started out as a few mobile trucks with showers and bathrooms has now turned into quite the movement! Now there are not only consistent schedules that people can follow these trucks with but Lava Mae also provides a variety of other community beneficial services. These include collecting personal hygiene and clothes for the users of their mobile facilities.


The company didn't stop at their mobile showers either, and they aren't protective over their idea either. In the eyes of Lava Mae they would like every city's homeless community to be provided with showers so they enacted the BuildIt Toolkit. This toolkit is purchasable and allows anyone to replicate their mobile hygiene services in their own communities. Lava Mae also allows you to register your mobile truck and show up on their map system for people of the community to find. Another cool aspect of Lava Mae? They have expanded even more on their idea of shower trucks and have created what they call "Pop Up Care Village's". These small pop up villages offer services like haircuts, laundry, healthy food options, and even healthcare services to the streets of California. Their motto is "Delivering Dignity" and I think they are doing just that.


Now back to our studio project for the semester. We first looked at how we would be able to engage the community with mobile healthcare facilities. I think that by researching more on Lava Mae as well as other companies that are filtering into the community in this way we will be able to design a prototypical mobile healthcare system for the residents of the Lawndale neighborhood in Chicago.


Check out the Lava Mae website to find out more and donate:

https://lavamae.org/ourimpact/


Watch the Pop-Up Video to learn more about how these pop up facilities are helping transform the homeless populations in California: https://lavamae.org/get-involved/


Photo Credit:https://lavamae.org/san-francisco/



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