When doing Sunday laundry becomes an act of solidarity with the homeless residents of Dallas
The first time Danielle Carty was collecting laundry from homeless residents of a local warehouse, a man said to her, “They’re asking us about our DNA.”
Only a few people initially allowed her to do her laundry – an understandable reluctance, said Carty, 22, the senior organizer of Say It With Your Chest, a self-proclaimed left-wing support group that now runs a regular laundry program.
“For someone who is not uninhabited, we have laundromats and services where we just entrust our clothes to people because clothes are interchangeable for us,” she said. “If I don’t get my jeans back, I’ll just get more jeans.”
For Say It With Your Chest organizers and volunteers, doing laundry is an act of solidarity with the homeless people of Dallas.
Making sure someone else has clean clothes is something you could do for a loved one. But it has also become a way of caring for other community members – the result of contacting and responding to those in need.
Say It With Your Chest’s laundry program is an example of how social services outreach can ensure people actually access these services, said Hannah Lebovits, professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington. “It has to do with whether that social connection was made,” she said.
The laundry program grew out of working with Camp Rhonda, a homeless camp named in memory of Rhonda Fenwick, who lived in her original location south of Deep Ellum before she died of organ failure and heat exhaustion in November 2020.
Late last year, Say It With Your Chest and other community groups began programming to support Camp Rhonda. But when Carty learned that homeless residents often burn their clothes if they are too dirty, she realized that the distribution of clothes could not be sustainable if the clothes could not be cleaned by themselves.
Now around 60 campers trust Say It With Your Chest with their clothes every week.
“Some of the people have been out there for decades. They understand that people like us come and go, ”said Gino Santolamazza, an organizer. “You see a service showing up, but it will go away as quickly as it arrived. I think the consistency was the most surprising thing for the residents. “
Camp Rhonda has since relocated, and Say It With Your Chest has expanded to serve three more camps. Even so, Say It With Your Chest volunteers arrive in South Dallas every Sunday afternoon, armed with 30-gallon garbage bags that double as laundry bags.
They often pause while handing out bags to each property, sometimes to pet Yeti the pit bull – “the friendliest dog here,” Santolamazza said – or to entertain a father joke or ideas for accessing remaining stimulus checks to discuss.
Say It With Your Chest volunteers, Iris Muscarella (left) and Gino Santolamazza unload sacks of washed laundry for homeless men and women outside a homeless camp in Dallas on July 25, 2021. The organization runs laundry days for homeless communities in Dallas every Sunday at an Xpress Wash n Dry on Columbia Avenue in Dallas. (Ben Torres / special article)
Once the bags are filled with clothing, volunteers tape them on and load them into a van affectionately called Big Ma. This summer, Say It With Your Chest has done more laundry than ever, especially after bad weather. Heavy rain often results in residents ‘belongings becoming soaked and requiring cleaning, especially if residents’ tents have holes in them.
Say It With Your Chest washes in Old East Dallas at Xpress Wash N Dry, a laundromat big enough to hold her weekly washes without crowding out other community members. Washing and drying there can cost anywhere from $ 2 to $ 7, depending on the size of the load, with the cost being offset by donations to Say It With Your Chest.
When they arrive, volunteers fan themselves on a laundry conveyor belt: they stack laundry bags in carts; Loading sacks into washing machines; Throwing in two laundry capsules; Measure out additional detergent, fabric softener and disinfectant; Transport clean clothes to dryers.
“Laundry is a pretty well oiled machine. I don’t have to instruct anyone to do anything. You just do it, ”Carty said. “This is mutual help. It is autonomous. “
(The only glitch on a recent Sunday: a camp resident, to their delight, left two laundry pods and dryer sheets in a sandwich bag on top of a laundry bag that volunteers could use.)
Even if the process gets stuck, the group takes it calmly. When a washing machine stops working, volunteers tape up the card slots so other laundromat customers know. If a tricky dryer pops open, they can duck in front of a flying shirt to make sure the dryer stays closed this time.
It takes about an hour to wash and dry each load of laundry, but Say It With Your Chest tries to return all of the laundry before dark.
The laundry operation seems to be going smoothly, but it doesn’t look like it until after “months of figuring it out,” said volunteer Peyton Lawrence.
“Everyone knows that people need food, water and shelter. There are a lot of organizations out there that are committed to this, ”said Lawrence, a student at the University of Texas at Dallas. “But some things, like laundry, are overlooked.”
The number of Say It With Your Chest volunteers grew slowly. Sometimes it was just three people cleaning about 30 loads of laundry.
Once, Lawrence said, they had so much laundry to do that she, Carty, and Santolamazza stayed at the Xpress Wash N Dry until nearly midnight. They went out to dinner late at night and returned to find themselves locked out – with more laundry to do and no way to get in for a moment.
Even then, the following week they were back in South Dallas, ready to do laundry.
Learn more at instagram.com/sayitwithyourchestdtx.
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