Joe Richardson had been thinking about the mobile laundromat for a long time — since 2010, in fact, when he first came up with the idea while serving a 14-year prison sentence in Philadelphia. The problem he wanted to solve was simple but consequential: people living on the street had nowhere safe to wash their clothes. Regular laundromats were risky — belongings left unattended in a public laundromat too often disappeared, leaving people with even less than they started with. Richardson believed that bringing the laundromat to the people, rather than asking them to come to it, could change that.
After his release in 2021, Richardson began working at his family's laundromat business, learning the practical side of what he'd spent years imagining. Then, in 2023, his 28-year-old brother was shot and killed while working as a tow truck driver. The loss changed everything. Richardson decided he needed to do something that felt meaningful — and finally turned his long-held idea into action.
A few hours every week, he now drives a trailer-mounted washing and drying unit to neighbourhoods across Philadelphia — including Kensington, one of the city's most underserved areas, home to many of the approximately 5,000 people living without permanent housing in the city. The service is entirely free. Residents bring their clothes, Richardson washes and dries them, and they leave with something that sounds small but isn't: the dignity of clean clothes.
For Richardson, the work is both practical and personal. Helping others, he says, helps him too. The idea that kept him going through 14 years behind bars is now, week by week, keeping others going too.