Get To Know Our CEO Kris Kepler

Last updated May 12, 2022.

Kris Kepler, CEO of LavaMaeˣ, is scaling up the nonprofit’s impact by enabling communities worldwide to deliver Radical Hospitality®—an ethos of meeting people wherever they are with extraordinary care—while bringing mobile showers and other essential care services to the street.

Since 2018, the nonprofit has provided expert consulting or seed funding to more than 58 organizations around the globe, with 40 of these starting up from scratch.

Promoted to CEO in 2020, Kepler has led LavaMaeˣ through transformation, innovation and challenges, including the pandemic. At the start of 2020, she guided the organization through a rebranding and pivot that shifted its focus to training others to provide Radical Hospitality, while keeping its fingers on the pulse of the streets through its weekly direct services.

In 2021, the LavaMaeˣ Connect platform went live to meet growing demand for LavaMaeˣ’s service model. This global online space for community leaders interested in launching mobile streetside services provides free resources, including mobile shower and other essential care toolkits. More than 1,908 people in over 840 cities in 41 countries share ideas, setbacks and victories on the platform, receiving support from one another and LavaMaeˣ’s staff as of April 2022.

When COVID-19 struck, Kepler and her team responded by delivering personal hygiene kits that included masks, hand sanitizer and gloves directly to encampments in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, where the nonprofit runs weekly mobile services. The kits also shared educational information about COVID transmission and handwritten notes of care to let people experiencing homelessness know they had not been forgotten. Kepler inspired her team to think of other ways to help guests and in response they quickly invented an affordable, do-it-yourself handwashing station that LavaMaeˣ helped deploy and support, providing more than a million handwashes in locations that lacked access to running water.

Kepler speaks and writes regularly about how Radical Hospitality restores dignity, rekindles optimism and fuels a sense of opportunity, and about the need for and impact of streetside services. Podcasts with The Christian Science Monitor and The Business of Giving feature her perspective and stories. In a 2021 Sustainable Brands article, she detailed how LavaMaeˣ and Unilever’s brand The Right To Shower have teamed up to push seed money to grassroots organizations starting up or expanding streetside services. In an Inside Philanthropy opinion piece, Kepler argued for the efficacy of funding grassroots consulting and regranting models, which enable small amounts of funding to have outsize impact.

Drawing on a prior 20-year career as a customer experience designer, Kepler understands how to apply a user-centered mindset to developing products and services for unhoused people, fostering cross-sector collaboration to solve issues affecting them and partnering with cities to galvanize action around hygiene and homelessness. She also gives her team room for creativity and guards against burnout. Early in the pandemic, she added mental health days to the nonprofit’s benefits and shared her leadership lessons for navigating crises in a Fast Company article.

Kepler joined LavaMaeˣ in 2017 after volunteering at one of its Pop-Up Care Villages, which bring a fair-like atmosphere to events featuring multiple providers offering a variety of care services. She created toolkits and educational experiences for LavaMaeˣ-trained mobile care providers in her initial role as senior director of programs and impact, and then was promoted to chief program and strategy officer.

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Want to learn more about our story and our strategy to bring more showers and care service to the street? Read our Case Statement!