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Lava Mae founder Doniece Sandoval, who has a background in marketing, community relations, and the arts, was eager to do something about the homelessness she saw every day in San Francisco. She began ...

Lava Mae uses a mobile trailer with showers and bathrooms to offer basic hygiene services to homeless people. To bring the services to others, it launched a free kit, so anyone can start up similar ...

With a mission of taking “radical hospitality” to the street, San Francisco–based Lava Mae was founded by Doniece Sandoval in 2014. A lightbulb went off after Sandoval encountered a homeless woman ...

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) -- Michael Thornton may have lost his home, but he never lost his self-esteem. The now housed San Francisco resident made staying clean a top priority even when he was living on ...

Doniece Sandoval, 57, and her family used to live in a diverse, middle-class neighborhood in San Francisco. But after the Great Recession, gentrification struck, turning their community into an ...

It started with a simple idea: that dignity and hygiene are inextricably linked. Doniece Sandoval was convinced homeless people deserve both, so ideas turned to action. Lava Mae has upgraded from its ...

That Lava Mae mobile “showers on wheels” vessel seen above has a new sidecar in its ongoing efforts to provide health, happiness, and human services to the San Francisco homeless population. The new ...

Five years ago, Doniece Sandoval gained a new perspective on San Francisco’s immense problem of homelessness. It happened in her own neighborhood. “There were three elderly gentlemen, all in their 80s ...

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Lava Mae operates a trailer, which provides curbside shower and restroom service just outside of City Hall to the homeless every Friday for roughly six hours. "It's real ...

For Doneice Sandoval the first turning point was watching her elderly neighbors get evicted from their San Francisco homes and turned away from crowded local shelters. Then there was the taxi driver ...

There are a multitude of modern conveniences that we now take for granted, but perhaps foremost among them is our access to water and sanitation. For the homeless population, that convenience -- the ...