His name was Eric, and people called him T-Bone. He was living on the streets of Ventura in the early 2000s when he told a group of friends from a local church something that stuck with them. “If I had clean clothes,” he said, “I think people would treat me as a human being.”
Greg Russinger and the others found a laundromat nearby and started showing up with quarters and detergent, first for T-Bone and then for anyone who needed it. That was the beginning of Laundry Love.
How Laundry Love Ventura grew
The model has barely changed. A local group, often a congregation, a school or a club, partners with a laundromat and picks a regular date. Volunteers pay for the machines, supply the soap and hang around while the clothes wash, talking with the people who come in. Some locations have added tutoring, basic medical care or a meal.
By 2014 the Associated Press counted more than 100 locations nationwide, open to volunteers of any faith or none. As of September 2026, the organization’s website lists more than 310 Laundry Love locations across the United States, more than four million loads washed and more than 3.1 million people served.
“When you’re washing clothes, all you have is time and each other,” Russinger, who now serves as the organization’s board president, told TODAY in 2014. “It can be a sustainable place to receive care.”
What changes
The people who keep coming back tend to describe the same shift. Juan Montes, a volunteer at a Huntington Beach location, put it this way to the AP: “It’s changed me in the way that now when I see people who are homeless, I don’t see them like an object. Now their stories come to mind, names come to mind, because I’ve had conversations with them.”
Christian Kassoff, who founded that Huntington Beach chapter, described his reason for doing it in one sentence. “I’m not wealthy but I have the gift of time and a heart for it, so this fits.”
Laundry Love’s own statement of purpose describes the laundromat as “an inclusive and welcoming place where strangers become friends, people are known by name, hope is hustled, and the worth of every human being is acknowledged and celebrated.” It started with one man’s wish for clean clothes, in Ventura, about 25 years ago.
Sources
- Laundry Love
- Laundry Love, About
- TODAY, Laundry Love program helps people in need afford clean clothes (Aug. 2014)
- Associated Press via The Spokesman-Review, Laundry Love brings faith to homeless (Sept. 2014)
- USC Dornsife Center for Religion and Civic Culture, Laundry Love (Oct. 2016)
