Volunteers Launch New Effort to Help Clean Blankets at Lacy Street Shelter

Trisha Gossett said that a holiday blanket drive she coordinated last month for North Central Animal Shelter was more successful than she could have imagined.

A storage room inside the Lacy Street shelter--which serves Northeast Los Angeles and parts of Echo Park--is currently packed with hundreds of blankets collected by Gossett and fellow volunteer Gretchen Knudsen. However, Gossett said that the shelter is now faced with another challenge--washing all those blankets that were collected to keep the dogs and cats warm through the winter.

Currently, the shelter only has two washing machines and a single drying machine, which means that many pets are left to sleep on soiled blankets.

"I became that there need was as I started to collect vast amounts of blankets and towels and rugs from the community. Lacy Street is apparently very behind the times when it comes to any kind of efficient laundry facility," she said. "The need for a commercial entity to do the laundry here will make the shelter run at optimum efficiency."

Clean and warm blankets can play a role in improving the demeanor of animals in shelters and makes them more likely to be adopted, Knudsen told Patch in December.

Speaking at the shelter on Wednesday afternoon, Gossett described effort she is about to launch, in coordination with Los Angeles Animal Services, to raise funds to pay for a commercial laundry service for the Lacy Street Shelter.

"The quest I'm on today is to launch a fundraiser of sorts to help provide money for perhaps a laundry service company to come in and keep up with the vast amount of laundry that keeps coming in, or to find money to rent a commercial laundry facility to help the people here operate more efficiently," Gossett.

Gossett said she is still working to find an estimate of how much such an effort would cost.

Anyone interested in supporting Gossett's effort is asked to contact her at trisha.gossett@gmail.com or by phone at (323) 791-6798