Lorna Moravec's dashboard

Clothes are complicated. There are tons of clothes people have they would donate and there are tons of people who need clothes. But clothes come in a huge variety of styles and sizes and it is like looking for a needle in a haystack for a person to try to find top, bottom, and all the other components appropriate for the the climate, the season, their gender, their size, their personal style (this is VERY important when someone homeless!) and have all the right parts (right underwear, right socks, right belt, ect.) in colors that look ok together and don't look stupid making the person feel even worse. The classic sad clown costume is basically the get up of a homeless person. You can dress like that or wear the same thing all the time till it is filthy or both. I have been homeless, luckily for me, for short periods.
About all the laundry truck people might be able to do is pass out generic new stuff like T-shirts and cotton drawstring pants in small, medium, and large. Not very green though, and makes no use of the billions of garments available for donation. To get donated clothing to the right person requires great organization, huge amounts of clean dry storage complete with hangers and racks as well as laundry facilities, and most of all, many volunteers putting in many hours to process the clothing. We really need to organize all the clothing donation/distribution efforts into a central national thing or even world wide.

I greatly prefer powder to liquid! The liquid is water mostly and weighs more using more fuel to transport. Worse, it comes in plastic and plastic is destroying the planet: look it up. Powder comes in cardboard boxes. I always get Tide powdered Free because I cannot STAND fragrances. I have multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome. More and more people are getting this because of all the modern (last 70 years) synthetics. I love Tide Free or whatever they call it (MCS affects short term memory too!)

I like this idea because of three reasons. It would create blankets for people in need. It is green ~ uses something that otherwise is not used and does not call for new stuff. It brings people together to work on things together and that is the best reason of all.

Tide has a good idea with this truck thing. Perhaps other large organizations such as state associations of churches or Lion's Clubs, Kiwanis, Jaycees (the larger associations/conventions of such organizations, that is) could get the same people who make the Tide trucks to make trucks that they can send round to help out smaller communities like Willowick.

If Tide won't do it for free maybe you guys could pay them per load the same thing you paid Donna's. As for Donna, was she insured? If not, maybe Tide could loan her a business loan to get back in business.

Good idea ~ when I stayed in a homeless shelter with my kids we were lucky enough to have one washing machine and a lady that ran it for the 50 -100 people in the shelter. Each lady was entitled to wash one load a week, more if you had kids. It was wonderful!