Non-Profit Laundry for Good

In Flint, Michigan, Leo and Mio Robinson are proving that a laundromat can be about far more than washing clothes. Good Laundry, the nonprofit they built alongside their church, Good Church, grew out of a simple question they started asking their neighbors while serving hot meals during the early days of the pandemic: what do you need besides food? The answer, a safe and affordable place to clean their clothes, led the Robinsons to a discovery they hadn't expected: families in their own community going without laundry access, kids skipping school over dirty clothes, and parents losing jobs over uniforms they couldn't keep clean. That discovery became a 17-machine, $500,000 facility, fully paid for, not-for-profit laundromat. On this episode, Leo and Mio join Full Cycle Host, Matt DeWolf, to talk about discovering "hygiene poverty" in their own backyard, why they deliberately kept Good Laundry and Good Church as two separate nonprofits with two separate entrances, and how a space built for washing clothes has become a place where kids do homework, families build community, and strangers walk in and, without being asked, start telling their life stories. They also talk about Good Laundry's Monday closures, when the facility is set aside entirely to serve women affected by sex trafficking, and what's next for the organization: replicating the model in other underserved communities and launching a wash-and-fold pickup and delivery service for neighbors who can't get to the laundromat at all.