While working on a story for our June issue about caring for nail clients with cancer, I reached out to nonprofit Beauty Bus for a sidebar about volunteer organizations serving this demographic. The Beauty Bus Foundation delivers free in-home beauty services to chronically or terminally ill men, women, children, and their caregivers. (In addition to clients undergoing cancer treatments, it services clients who can’t visit a salon for reasons like ALS, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injury, and other select neuromuscular and motor neuron diseases). The organization also sends free bags of beauty products to individuals with chronic and terminal illnesses and their caregivers for whom Beauty Bus isn’t currently able to visit and care for in person.

I was first introduced to Beauty Bus as its first national pop-up salon in Las Vegas, which was a great way for Beauty Bus to service clients outside of its core hub of Los Angeles County. I then attended an after-show event hosted by the foundation during tradeshow ISSE Long Beach 2013. I love Beauty Bus’s mission, and, I encourage licensed nail techs in the areas Beauty Bus serves to reach out and volunteer.

When contacting Beauty Bus for this story, I was happy to hear about all of the ways it’s growing and helping more people. If you’ve been thinking about joining, some of these improvements may make it the perfect time for you to fill out a volunteer form:
-Beauty Bus will be expanding its in-home services to Southern California’s Orange and Ventura Counties.
-It will hold five national pop-up salons this year including in Chicago, New York, Las Vegas, and Massachusetts.
-In addition to its 3-hour training sessions for new volunteers, Beauty Bus now holds additional educational events.  For instance, recently nail tech, esthetician, and cancer “thriver” Karen Hodges spoke about her research and experience from the perspective of both a beauty professional and a patient.
-In order to shorten the wait time for clients and recruit more beauty professionals to join the organization in fulfilling its mission, Beauty Bus recently began paying beauty professionals for their time during in-home visits. (Pop-up salons are still on a purely volunteer basis.)

Start the process of becoming a Beauty Bus volunteer by filling out the online volunteer application.

—Sree