These friends put their heads together to help the homeless

Chris Bentley and Carlos Miller have been friends since middle school. They shared a vision to give homeless people a place to clean up. So they founded Live Fresh Palm Beach County, a mobile shower and personal hygiene facility in Florida.

According to the Palm Beach Post, the nonprofit’s goal is to offer assistance and restore dignity to the county’s homeless. The 29 1/2-foot-long air-conditioned trailer, which has six private shower/bath/changing area-combination rooms, makes weekly stops at three locations in the county. For Bentley and Miller, FRESH is an acronym that stands for Feeling Revitalized Encourages Sustainable Happiness.

The two have teamed up with local faith-based institutions for the mobile stop locations. The organization received a couple of grants totaling $107,500 to assist in startup costs.

“For us, that’s where dignity and self-respect starts … with the ability to stay clean and be presentable,” Bentley said. “Cleanliness is a fundamental need. We actually see it as basic human right, and because the homeless population can be hard to reach, we knew we would have to come to them and make ourselves available in areas they could easily reach.”

In 2015, across Palm Beach County during a 24-hour period, 1,421 individuals and families were homeless as defined by the federal Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act.

Miller wrote on the company’s website that “the catalyst to start Live Fresh Palm Beach County was through my random interactions with the homeless community in places of commerce. To see a human being, living in the United States of all countries, walk inside a store with apprehension over being shunned or offensive to the atmosphere due to their odor or disheveled state grabbed at the core of my heart.”

Read more at the Palm Beach Post.