Odesa: Restoring Dignity Through Clean Laundry

In the world of humanitarian aid, "essential goods" are often defined as food, water, or medicine. But for families living in long-term collective centers, the definition of essential shifts. Ask a mother living in a shelter what she misses most about home, and the answer is often simple: "A way to wash our clothes."

This month, in partnership with the Krohn Breakthrough Foundation, we executed a targeted infrastructure project to solve a silent crisis in Odesa.

The Crisis: 120 People, Zero Machines We identified an Internally Displaced Person (IDP) community in Odesa that is currently housing 120 residents. These are families who have fled active combat zones, often arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

The facility was overwhelmed. With no functional laundry infrastructure, residents were forced to wash clothes by hand in sinks or buckets—a process that is physically exhausting, time-consuming, and unsanitary for a group of this size. In a dense communal living environment, the inability to effectively wash clothes and bedding quickly becomes a health and hygiene issue.

The Solution: A Laundry Fleet We didn't just donate a single machine; we installed a full-scale laundry capability.

Thanks to funding from the Krohn Breakthrough Foundation, we purchased and delivered a suite of industrial-capacity equipment:

• 5 Heavy-Duty Washing Machines

• 5 High-Capacity Dryer

The Impact This equipment instantly restores the capacity to handle the daily laundry load for all 120 residents.

The impact goes beyond clean shirts. It is about dignity. It means a soldier's wife can send her children to school in clean clothes without spending hours scrubbing in a cold sink. It frees up time for residents to focus on finding work, processing documents, and caring for their families.

We are grateful to the Krohn Breakthrough Foundation for recognizing that true relief often looks like a spin cycle.