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# lava mae
Here's how this bus could change homeless people's lives
There are over 3,500 people living on the streets in San Francisco.
BEING HOMELESS MEANS that you may lack access to what the rest of us take for granted: a bed to sleep on, a toilet to use, a shower to wash under.
Now an innovative organisation in San Francisco has turned a decommissioned bus into mobile shower and toilet facilities.
The company, Lava Mae, aims to have four buses on the road by 2015, providing over 2000 showers a week.
Lava Mae received a $100,000 grant from Google as part of its Impact Challenge for the Bay Area.
Here’s more about how it turned the bus into a mobile shower:
The project comes from Lava Mae’s belief that:
Everyone has the right to be clean. With hygiene comes dignity and dignity, opportunity.
There are only seven locations in San Francisco where if you’re homeless you can take a shower – and there are over 3,500 people on the city’s streets who are homeless.
While there aren’t plans for a franchise, Lava Mae is “committed to open source sharing of everything we’ve learned and created from the budget to the bus design”, its founder Doniece Sandoval told TheJournal.ie, adding that they have already been contacted by people from Ghana to Egypt.
What do you think of Lava Mae?
Read: ‘The government needs to act now’: Demand for homeless service up 25%>
