A special message from Kris Kepler, CEO
Pivoting to LavaMaeˣ
We began the year focusing on building a worldwide network of providers that bring LavaMaeˣ-designed programs to communities to serve 100K people by 2024.
This year fourteen organizations we’ve advised, mentored and trained have launched mobile hygiene and handwashing stations in their communities, and they've served over 5,000 people around the United States!
Meanwhile, our current consulting portfolio includes over 100 social entrepreneurs and non-profit organizations who intend to launch mobile shower and handwashing programs in the near future. Requests for our consulting services continue to grow, and we're looking forward to another year of helping to bring our programs to communities worldwide.
COVID-19 Response
With the arrival of COVID-19, 2020 turned into a year that greatly tested the resilience and emotional fortitude of myself, the team, and our guests. In March, I made the difficult decision to suspend our shower service and Pop-Up Care Village programs for the health and safety of our guests and team.
This decision came at a heavy emotional cost - I felt sadness, guilt, uncertainty and fear.
We had to focus on the immediate needs of our unhoused community, a majority of whom are disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and people of color. The BIPOC community is facing COVID-19 and its economic impact at greater levels than the general population. There had to be a path to direct service, I had to find a way, even if it “looked” different.
We began assembling hygiene kits with critical hygiene and COVID-19 prevention items to distribute, streetside on a weekly basis. We had the basics, but also saw our guests desperately needed water, masks, hand sanitizer, gloves, food and clothes, items we added based on their needs.
We canvassed the streets of San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles, delivered kits to encampments and our brick and mortar partners. We enlisted our Bay Area partner, The UCSF Street Nursing team who joined us weekly in both SF and Oakland, delivering wound care services streetside, conducting health checks and making point-in-time referrals to local clinics.
One of our guests in San Francisco said, “If it wasn’t for you all, nobody would be here to help us. These hygiene kits are like a representation of love, it’s people like you who keep us afloat.”
Since March, with the support of donors like you, we’ve delivered over 7,000 hygiene kits throughout the Bay Area and Los Angeles, providing our guests with hope and connecting with them as human beings worthy of love and respect.
Clean Hands For All
Delivering kits on the streets opened my eyes to new challenges our guests are experiencing due to COVID-19. There’s a major lack of access to clean water; exacerbated by the closures of fast food restaurants, cafes, and libraries.
This sparked new ideas for innovation, and we took action by creating a DIY handwashing station and toolkit to help any community build and install handwashing stations in their community. We created and deployed seventeen units in our local communities, and shared our toolkit with the world. A total of 541 units have been deployed by replicators across the country, providing over one million handwashes!
Relaunching Shower Service
Getting back to providing showers became essential; it’s core to what we do. We spent months researching the virus, waiting on the availability of PPE equipment and then updated our service protocols so we could be prepared to safely offer shower service throughout this pandemic.
I’m happy to announce that we’ve relaunched weekly shower service in San Francisco and Los Angeles!
I want to personally thank you for your unwavering support and trust as we continue to innovate, take action, and inspire communities to deliver Radical Hospitality. We will continue to serve our local communities with the utmost care and compassion, share our IP, and collaborate with communities everywhere to bring hygiene access for all.
With gratitude,
Kris Kepler
CEO of LavaMaeˣ
