Young provider for homeless hits goal early
You’ll need to sit down for this one. There’s actually an effort to help homeless people in San Francisco that set a concrete goal and reached it — 16 months early.
Lava Mae, the nonprofit that brings mobile shower stalls and toilets to homeless people on the streets, set a goal of providing 75,000 showers to 30,000 homeless Californians by the end of 2020. And it’s already achieved it.
“We were utterly stunned,” said Doniece Sandoval, who founded Lava Mae five years ago, on the San Francisco City Insider podcast. “How is this possible? And yet, there we are.”
The speedy progress, of course, is in stark
contrast to slowmoving City Hall, which oversaw a spike of 17% in homeless people in the past two years. Sure, providing showers and toilets is easier than building housing and treating mental illness, but City Hall is slow on even the most basic issues, like keeping its Pit Stop public toilets open overnight.
Sandoval said Lava Mae is about “innovation and collaboration” when City Hall seems to be stuck in the same old red tape. And most things at City Hall — including, yes, the Pit Stop toilets — require studies and pilots and prototypes.
“We tend to say yes — we’re willing to take risks,” Sandoval said. “We don’t have to have five years of proven results. It’s just about getting in there and figuring out what works.”
Sandoval founded Lava Mae when she learned the city offered just 16 showers for its thousands of homeless. Three years ago, she expanded the idea into “PopUp Care Villages” to bring a host of services, including haircuts, clothes and employment help, to homeless people alongside the showers and toilets. Lava Mae now operates in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Los Angeles.
Now that the nonprofit — with an annual budget of $2.45 million — has reached its goal, it has already set a new one: training 75 communities around the world in the next five years to create their own versions of Lava Mae and together serving 100,000 people worldwide by 2024.
To hear more from Sandoval — including how to talk to kids about homelessness and what regular San Franciscans can do about the crisis — listen to our full conversation at sfchronicle. com/insider.