Inside small laundromat, acts of kindness unfold

By Steve Young, for Pigeon605

There’s a place in Sioux Falls, a little laundromat on the corner of Third Street and Cliff Avenue, where loneliness is washed away and dignity finds new hope with every load.

The sign over the door says Laundromat Company. But the name doesn’t begin to capture the wonders transpiring inside.

For here, on every second and fourth Tuesday of the month, the hungry are fed. The lonely are embraced. The clothes of people in need are made clean, and the marginalized are reminded of just how beautiful humankind can be.

“It is pretty special, this place,” said Naahma Golden amidst the din of washing machine drums tumbling around her on a recent Tuesday. “What they do here has saved my life.”

What they do at Laundromat Company is a recurring act of kindness called Laundry With Love. Those who come are invited to bring in up to three big baskets of laundry – roughly 12 loads – once a month to be washed and dried at no expense to them.

To cover the costs, Laundry With Love director Harriet Monson and her volunteers provide stacks of quarters that have been donated through special collections at local and area churches. Roughly $600 to $700 is spent each time, Monson said. The laundromat’s owner provides a discounted rate as well.

People coming in sign up for half-hour slots between 3 and 7 p.m. on those Tuesdays – or they can simply walk in off the street. It’s typical for 45 to 50 people to come through the door with bedding, blankets, clothes and more to be cleaned, Monson said.

“Mostly, I would say it is single moms that are just trying to make ends meet,” she said. “It’s like, they are down to their last five or 10 dollars. So their decision is they can pay that money to do their laundry, or they can come here.”

The idea for all this was hatched more than five years ago – in the first months after an evolving ministry called Church on the Street began reaching out to the disadvantaged and those experiencing homelessness.

A faith community within The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America here in Sioux Falls, Church on the Street has worship once a month – outdoors at Heritage Park in the summer and indoors at the Multi-Cultural Center in the winter. On its website, it calls itself “a church without walls that takes the gifts of the church out to the people of God who, for whatever reason, do not feel comfortable entering into the walls of the church.”

Roughly 25 percent of what Church on the Street does involves worship, Monson said. The rest of the time is spent going to people on the street or wherever they congregate, such as the Bishop Dudley Hospitality House. Church on the Street staff are at the Bishop Dudley shelter weekly to offer pastoral care – everything from Communion to conversation, prayer to Hy-Vee gift cards.

One of its most profound endeavors, Laundry With Love, came about when Church on the Street was in its infancy stages and trying to discern where it might make the greatest difference in people’s lives. One of its early leaders, Rebel Hurd, had been moved by the story of a young local high school student who was being ridiculed because his clothes were dirty and he smelled.

“Rebel and the others were in the stages of trying to get a feel for what people really needed and wanted back then,” Monson said. “This young man asked her if she would take him to a laundromat and wash clothes for him. And so, she did.”

Soon after, the Women of the ELCA, or WELCA, scraped together $900 and a bunch of fabric softener and detergent. With that financial and material stake, Monson and others went looking for a participatory laundromat. And so it was that Laundry With Love was born.

At first, it was a lot of those single moms coming through the laundromat door – women whose idea of doing laundry was washing their children’s clothes in the bathtub and hanging them around the house to dry. But single moms weren’t the only ones. Others, including the elderly, the jobless and the lonely, found their way to Laundry With Love as well.

Monson said they figured they should try to provide a snack for people coming in to have their laundry done. Maybe a bag of chips or something. “But it turned out people were just so hungry, we were giving guys five bags of chips or something,” she said. “So it’s like, ‘Well, OK, let’s do a meal.’”

With permission from the laundromat’s owner, they were allowed to use a small room in the facility to serve food. Some days it might be pizza. Or perhaps goulash or a casserole. Soon enough, families, businesses and mostly church groups were showing up each time to provide a meal. And if it is nice outside, they might set up a lemonade stand outside, too, or provide ice cream and root beer floats.

“We found we had another 30 to 70 people that come and eat and don’t even have laundry,” Monson said. “That happens a lot around the end of the month or the beginning of the next month, when their food is getting in short supply.”

Laundry With Love also provides a rack with books for people to take at no cost. Gloria Dei Lutheran has a mobile salon that it brings each fourth Tuesday of the month from spring to fall to provide haircuts. Monson and the volunteers also have set up what they call the Undercover Closet, where once every three or so months, people can pick out new socks, underwear, bras and T-shirts off a cart.

For those walking in with only the clothes they are wearing, Laundry With Love can accommodate them as well, providing a separate set of clothes they can change into while their own is in the washer and dryer.

This laundromat and its community have been a godsend to Naahma Golden, who was in Rapid City for more than 20 years before downsizing ended her employment. Now, Laundry With Love provides the means for her to clean her sheets, pillowcases and blankets that “otherwise wouldn’t be cleaned in a long time.”

“I was a single mom for many years. And when I lost my job, I didn’t have any savings or anything. I didn’t know how I was going to make it,” Golden said. “I’d have to be taking a significant portion of my Social Security check to do my laundry.”

Cindy Day echoes that story. She was experiencing homelessness when she moved here from Oklahoma six years ago, living in the women’s section of the Union Gospel Mission and always worried about her next meal. In time, someone at the mission told her about Rebel Hurd and Church on the Street.

That connection changed the trajectory of her life, Day said. She came to the laundromat and not only washed and dried her clothes for free, but also became part of a community that has come to mean the world to her. She helps out at Laundry With Love now, running the Undercover Closet, or meets the people as they come through the door and helps them with their own laundry.

“I’m not just a volunteer,” Day insists. “This is my life. This is what I do. These are my people. I know what they’re going through because I’ve been there. I’ve made friends here, so I know them, and they know me.”

There is a socialization aspect to all this that is like a beacon at a time when researchers say Americans are facing an epidemic of loneliness. This spring, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a public advisory detailing an uptick in that loneliness because of the COVID crisis and other factors.

Feelings of isolation and loneliness may be rising because Americans’ social networks and interactions are in decline, Murthy said. In 2021, 49 percent of adults reported having three or fewer friends, compared to about 27 percent in 1990, he said. For young people age 15 to 24, time spent in person with friends fell from 150 minutes per day in 2003 to 40 minutes per day in 2020, according to the advisory.

Those numbers resonate with Kayla Beitelspacher, who has cerebral palsy. She comes to Laundry With Love occasionally to do laundry, but more often because of the community of people there who love and accept her. “It doesn’t matter what you’re going through, this is a safe place to come and know you’ll be loved,” she said.

The outside world often seems inclined to walk past a woman in a wheelchair, Beitelspacher said. Even churches she has been to do that, she added.

“They say they love you, but they’re scared … to touch you or hug you or anything because of my disability. I’m like, ‘Look, I’m not going to break. I need love and companionship like anyone else.’ And I find that friendship here.”

While Beitelspacher sat at a table chatting, Skip Jungemann stood nearby and peered into a washing machine. He can get lonely, too, he said, “but then, I also don’t like being around a lot of people,” he added. In fact, Jungemann had been living in California for a long time when his manufactured home out there burned back in 2015. Now that insurance and other replacement dollars are coming in, he’s planning to head back to the West Coast this winter to rebuild.

Until then, he has a house over by The Banquet on Eighth Street that he’s hesitant to work on too much since he’s planning to move back to California. As a result, he has no air conditioning, no heat, no hot water, and he sleeps on old couch cushions that he has set on a piece of plywood and covered with a mattress pad and blanket.

“I’m going to start from scratch in California and rebuild. I think positive,” he said. “Until then, I come here to do laundry. And I like to bs with people too. This is a good place to do that.”

It is a good place, a destination where those in need can stuff their comforters in a washing machine or their requests in a prayer box. Laundry With Love has both, Monson said. It’s not unusual for the prayer box to be full – people asking for help with their addictions, or housing, or family dysfunction.

That they feel so comfortable to bring those requests to this ministry is uplifting if not perhaps a bit surprising, Monson said. Laundry With Love has had its fair share of surprises. Like when the collections shut down during COVID and she thought the quarters would stop coming in. And then lo and behold, the organization won a grant through a group called The Hundred Women Who Care that brought in about $14,000 and saved them, Monson said.

“I had not a clue that all this was going to happen,” she said of this ministry. “I thought eventually we wouldn’t be able to do it anymore because of the fact that it just kept getting more expensive. Somehow, people just keep coming up with money, and we haven’t run out.”

It doesn’t run out, said one of Monson’s colleagues at Laundry With Love, Dr. Yvonne Oppold, because people recognize God at work in this ministry, in this place, and want to support it.

“Between clean clothes and the haircuts that we do, people can walk out of here with some dignity, maybe get a job interview,” Oppold said. “I wish things weren’t so disparate, that there was such a difference between haves and have-nots. But I like to think we do make a difference.”

Monson admits that she worries at times that they’ll end up eventually with more people than they can handle. It would be nice if this ministry could evolve into other sites around Sioux Falls, she said. At the same time, “you also kind of want to spread the word because more people that know about it can, who knows, like fund it or volunteer for it and all that,” she said.

Who knows? It could happen someday. But whether it does or not, Monson said she and the others will be at that little laundromat at the corner of Third and Cliff every second and fourth Tuesday of the month, washing clothes and continuing to build what they call community.

“For me, it’s just another opportunity to meet people,” she said. “Simple as that.”