Laundry Love is a growing faith-driven movement that helps people change their lives by letting them change into clean clothes. The organization partners with local laundromats and helps those who are homeless or struggling financially by doing their laundry for free.
It is the kind of grass roots outreach that shows that even small changes can have big impacts on the lives of people in need.
You’re not just checking a box to give a donation. You’re spending the whole evening with these people and getting your hands dirty and it’s intimate — you’re doing people’s laundry,” said LuzAnna Figueroa, who volunteers at the group’s Huntington Beach chapter and has grown close to Mitchell and her daughter.
Richard Flory, a religion expert from the University of Southern California who has studied Laundry Love extensively, said Mitchell is just one example of how the organization can profoundly impact people through something as simple as washing their clothes.
“It’s an opportunity for people . to live out their faith out in a concrete way, in a frankly elegantly simple model where you do something that’s necessary for people who don’t have the means to do it for themselves,” Flory said.
The movement began about 10 years ago with a small Christian church in Ventura, California, and has since spread to more than 100 locations throughout the country to people from all faiths.