Our Story

Homelessness in San Francisco has been a wrenching problem for decades, so seemingly intractable that most residents simply look away

In 2013, Doniece Sandoval had three experiences that compelled her to open her eyes and truly see—and then to act

First she witnessed three of her neighbors, all men in their 80s struggling against the tide of gentrification, get evicted. They were forced to live in their cars, and then even those refuges were repossessed. All three ended up on the street.

Around the same time, she recalls, “I took a cab ride that changed my life. As we hit the Tenderloin, a neighborhood with the highest concentration of homelessness in San Francisco, the cab driver turned to me and said, ‘Welcome to the land of broken dreams.’ I looked out the window and my first thought was that not a single person on that street had dreamed they would grow up to be homeless. That thought of them as children really pierced me, because at that time my own daughter was five years old.”

A few months later in the design district, Sandoval passed a young woman who was panhandling. “She was distraught, disheveled, and she kept saying over and over that she would never be clean. While I knew her words probably meant many things, I got curious about what her chances were of getting physically clean.”

Not good, it turned out. Sandoval researched the question, and what she found shocked her: the city had only 16 public shower stalls for about 7,000 unhoused people. A few weeks later she read that the city transit agency was retiring old buses. And then it clicked: “The bells went off in my head and I got this crazy idea to take those buses and convert them into mobile showers and toilets.”

She drew city insiders and corporate partners into her vision, pushed through the implementation hurdles, and worked with a designer to create visually appealing, thoughtfully appointed rolling facilities. Barely a year later, Lava Mae (a play on “wash me” in Spanish) began taking dignity, hope, and a fresh sense of opportunity to the streets.

Within weeks of the June 2014 launch, Sandoval was struck by a powerful yet nuanced quality in the service that two of her team members provided

They had a secret salve that healed Lava Mae guests. It came from looking them in the eye, learning their names and stories, wishing them well with genuine feeling, and generally recognizing their common humanity. She realized that the way service is delivered is more transformative than the service itself—and Lava Mae’s core Radical Hospitality® approach was born.

Showering the world with Radical Hospitality: becoming LavaMaeˣ

Lava Mae’s launch struck a chord. The need on the streets was obvious—people could feel it in their own skin—and that need combined with a strong brand, savvy communications, and effusive guests sparked widespread media coverage. That attention brought inquiries from around the world from people who wanted Lava Mae-style services in their own communities, and as Lava Mae grew, expanding service to Los Angeles and then to Oakland, so did the requests for assistance.

Lava Mae met its five-year impact goal 16 months early, exceeding 30,000 guests served in September 2019. By then, the organization had fielded more than 4,250 inquiries from city agencies, nonprofits, governments, refugee aid organizations, and individuals in the U.S. and 39 other countries seeking to provide Lava Mae-like services. Its do-it-yourself toolkit for mobile shower and care services had been downloaded over 2,700 times, and the Lava Mae team had inspired, advised, or trained 157 organizations worldwide.

Poised to leap to a new level, Lava Mae saw meeting the surging demand for street-based services as its new calling. In January 2020, the organization rebranded as LavaMaeˣ—for exponential growth and impact acceleration.

LavaMaeˣ maintains direct service in our home cities to provide real-life training and engage guests in testing product and service innovations, but primarily focuses on teaching people around the world to bring mobile showers and other essential care services to their own streets, where unhoused neighbors need them most.

That need is immense: The 2019 point-in-time count in the U.S. identified about 568,000 people experiencing homelessness, and that’s likely an undercount. Some estimates of the true total exceed 1.5 million people. Getting an accurate picture of global homelessness is extremely challenging, but the last global survey—by the United Nations in 2005—estimated that 100 million people were homeless worldwide.

In the face of this crisis, LavaMaeˣ’s mission is to change the way the world sees and serves people experiencing homelessness. Our current impact goal is to create a global network of communities launching and sustaining LavaMaeˣ-designed programs that serve 100,000 people moving through homelessness by 2024.

The vision: a world where hygiene is treated as a human right and communities everywhere mobilize to provide Radical Hospitality.