Jodie Dolan tripped over a woman in the dark one night in downtown Los Angeles, and did not know it right away. The smell hit her first, so overwhelming it took a moment to understand what, or who, she had stumbled into. She screamed. Then she understood, and she was mortified.
She ran after the woman with the only money she had on her, twenty dollars, and pressed it into her hands. The woman took it but seemed unable to process what it was or what to do with it. Dolan walked away thinking there had to be a better way to help than twenty dollars handed to a stranger in the dark.
She already knew Skid Row well. She had run her own fashion label out of the Fashion District for years, blocks from the encampments, and she lived downtown too. The homelessness crisis was not something she could look past on her way to work. It was outside her door.
She sat with that encounter for a while. Then a friend invited her to help make sandwiches for a group called Monday Night Mission, and she said yes. She kept saying yes, showing up once or twice a week for two years, and got to know the people in line: teenagers, grandmothers, people who had just come home from a shift at work. The community was nothing like what she expected, and it put a face on the problem she had been turning over in her mind.
She started volunteering with Shower of Hope too, and it was there, watching a woman step out of a shower clean and transformed, that the idea arrived. Dolan helped that same woman back into the dirty clothes she had arrived in. The contrast stuck with her. What if there were a truck, fitted with washing machines, that could bring the other half of that transformation to people where they already were?
She had no idea how to build one. She was not an engineer. She researched trailer companies that outfitted campers with washers, toured movie studios to understand how their generator trucks worked, and talked to what she estimates was a hundred people. Eventually she called her longtime business lawyer and asked what he thought of the idea. He told her it was a good one, offered to help raise the money, and set up a 501(c)(3). Between her business connections and his fundraising, they raised about seventy thousand dollars and built the first truck.
Dolan tried to give the whole thing away. She partnered with Shower of Hope to bring laundry to their existing sites, then reached out to two nonprofits doing similar work, one in Australia and one in Denver, hoping to hand off the Los Angeles operation to someone better suited to run it. She got a colleague from Shower of Hope to run it for six months. He came back and gave her the keys. “You need to do it,” he told her.
So she did. The organization funded itself for the first year. Then the city of Los Angeles called, impressed that no one else was doing this work, and offered a contract. The Laundry Truck LA now runs four trailers on a mix of city and county contracts, grants, in-kind donations, and corporate partnerships. It has completed more than 738,000 pounds of laundry since its first load in 2019, a number that climbs every month.
Dolan is not involved in day-to-day operations these days. She estimates the nonprofit takes up thirty to forty percent of her time now, mostly fundraising and partnerships, while a team she credits entirely runs the trucks. She describes Angelica, the program manager, and Andre, another team lead, simply: they lead with their hearts.
Getting the trucks right took its own trial and error. The first stackable washers and dryers, bought from Home Depot, lasted about a month. Whirlpool and Maytag machines came next and did not hold up either. Speed Queen machines finally worked, and worked well enough that Dolan and her team built out a full blueprint: standard operating procedures, a budget, a video walkthrough, all of it made public, because so many people were calling to ask how to replicate it that she could not keep answering by phone.
What began as a response to Skid Row’s unhoused community grew from there. Dolan learned that seventeen thousand children in Los Angeles County are unhoused, and the trucks started showing up at schools, from elementary campuses through community college. When a landslide hit Palos Verdes, The Laundry Truck LA responded. When wildfire tore through Altadena last year, the organization worked with Anthem to stand up services five days a week starting that January, for families who had lost everything.
Madison Elementary, a Title One school in Pasadena, was already on the route before the fires. Its principal runs a community where, in Dolan’s words, there is no shame in asking for help and everyone pitches in for everyone else. When the fire-response funding ran out, Dolan found other money to keep the truck coming to Madison anyway.
The trucks now visit eighteen locations a week, though Dolan says forty or fifty more schools, shelters, hospitals, and libraries have asked for the service and are waiting on funding. Santa Monica City College, which runs a weekly food pantry for students and staff alongside a large annual Thanksgiving event, is one of the newer partnerships Dolan hopes to fund.
Some encounters have stayed with her. A mother living in her car at a safe parking lot with three or four children, fleeing domestic violence, was overcome with gratitude over something as ordinary as clean laundry. After the fires, families spoke to her raw with loss and thankful all the same. At one elementary school on Skid Row, where forty percent of the students live in a shelter, Dolan met a girl who had come from Africa and, in the second grade, already spoke four languages.
“I think we’re in the business of sharing love,” Dolan said. “We’re providing some dignity through clean clothes, but it’s really a heart to heart thing.”
The organization tries never to turn anyone away. There is no paperwork required, no questions asked. “If you show up, we’ll do your laundry,” Dolan said. The exception is certain school district contracts, where funding rules dictate more specifically who can be served, a source of ongoing frustration for a team that prides itself on removing barriers rather than adding them.
Each truck carries five washers and five dryers, runs on propane, and brings its own power. On a typical visit, the team completes forty to fifty loads. The best outcomes, Dolan has found, come from showing up at the same place on the same day every week, so families can build it into their routines the way they would any other appointment. It becomes less like charity and more like something closer to family.
LumenSparQ is proud to name Jodie Dolan a Lumenary, in recognition of the work The Laundry Truck LA does across Los Angeles schools and communities. As part of that recognition, LumenSparQ’s $1,000 in program support will help keep the truck coming to Madison Elementary, the same Tuesday routine families there already count on. If you would like to support the Laundry Truck LA directly, visit their website.
Dolan thinks often about the people her trucks serve feeling invisible, and about what it means to interrupt that. “I think our goal is really to reach out a hand and help people,” she said. “Let people know that there is somebody, even if they don’t know who we are, somebody is looking after them.”
It started with twenty dollars that a woman in the dark could not even recognize as help. It has become a truck that shows up every week, dignity folded into every load.