Mattress donations cushion worries for Las Vegas homeless shelters

By Conor Shine

Tuesday, July 31, 2012 | 2 a.m.

Some in Las Vegas’ homeless population will sleep a bit easier thanks to a donation of 200 new beds to the Salvation Army.

The donation was made by the California-based nonprofit WorldBed, which plans to donate a total of 2,000 of its specially designed “shelter beds” to local homeless shelters run by the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, Shade Tree and Las Vegas Rescue Mission.

“These people come in for a night; they need to have the dignity of having a place to sleep that’s comfortable,” said Laura Castro, WorldBed executive director. “If they have a good night’s sleep, they can get up, have a fresh day and start trying to get their life back together.”

WorldBed, founded in 2010, initially focused its efforts on providing beds in disaster-relief situations, including in Joplin, Mo. — much of which was leveled in May 2011 by a tornado — and in Japan after an earthquake and a tsunami struck in March 2011.

Castro said the nonprofit’s involvement with homeless shelters stemmed from a desire to be more proactive. Las Vegas was chosen for the launch of the new campaign, dubbed Project Beds for America, because of its large homeless population — estimated around 10,000 — and WorldBed’s relationship with the Las Vegas Market, where it is exhibiting mattresses this week.

The bed donation came at a perfect time for the Salvation Army, which was attempting to acquire new beds to replace the old, worn and torn mattresses at its shelter in downtown Las Vegas, said David Robeck, the ministry’s executive director of social services. Robeck said new mattresses would cost $150 each, totaling tens of thousands of dollars the shelter would be hard-pressed to afford.

“You can get a cheap mattress and it will last six months under the kind of conditions we use it for; we needed something more durable,” Robeck said. “We’re constantly having a battle of how many people we can serve. Everything comes down to the budget. ... The mattresses had to kind of rest there. They were technically functional, but they weren’t good and we weren’t doing a good service.”

The new beds were designed with shelters in mind, using medical-grade fabrics that should make cleaning and maintaining the mattresses much easier, Castro said.

The foam mattresses are sealed to prevent bed bugs from creeping in and they’re waterproof to protect them from accidents, she said. The unique materials that line the outside of the bed help cut down on bacteria and viruses that cause infections, which can be a problem if several people sleep in a bed throughout the course of the week.

“These mattresses have got materials so you can wash it off and not worry about cross contamination,” she said.

Castro said she hopes Las Vegas can be a pilot program for WorldBed as it works to expand its donation of beds to homeless shelters throughout the country.

“For us, I see this as a stepping stone,” she said. “We’ve gotten some feedback, and this really gave us an opportunity to see how we can replicate this in other areas of the United States.”