It was while bicycling from Westwood to the beach in Santa Monica that film producer Peter Samuelson began noticing something disturbing—the number of homeless he passed regularly. He started counting. Sixty-two homeless. Just eight miles.

He began interviewing the homeless to find out more about them, how they lived, and what they needed. He conceptualized a mobile, single-person device that would facilitate recycling (a principal source of income for many homeless) by day, and at night convert into a tent-like enclosure for sleeping, with privacy and storage space. It would be called EDAR, short for Everyone Deserves A Roof.

Samuelson approached Art Center to sponsor a studio to design the EDAR. Students Eric Lindeman and Jason Zasa designed the product, and have been working pro bono on the project since. EDARs are given free of charge to homeless individuals who are best able to benefit from their recycling and shelter capabilities. But EDARs don’t come cheap. Each one costs around $500 to produce.

For the next four days, Tonic.com is sponsoring a campaign to raise funds for 10 EDARs. That’s a roof over 10 homeless Angelenos.

Watch the L.A. Times video below to see the EDAR out in the field.

From Tonic.com’s article: The final EDAR design boasts a 7-foot-long mattress among an interior high enough for residents to sit up. The EDAR units live at shelters, soup kitchens, day centers, churches, mosques or vacant scraps of land throughout the Los Angeles area and are distributed free of charge, as resources allow. “We give the units to shelters and they give them to specific clients,” explains Samuelson. “The benefit is that they have an ongoing social services. You can push it wherever you want and you can sleep in it wherever you want, and you have to come back once a week, have a shower, have lunch, meet with your supervisor, etc. there’s ongoing counseling.”

Donate to the Tonic.com campaign.

Learn more:

• EDAR
• L.A. Times article on the EDAR
• L.A. Times columnist spends the night on Skid Row