Cleaning With Compassion: New York’s Nonjudgemental Cleaning Service

Davina Ferbert always knew she wanted to use her psychology degree to help people. She had considered being a speech language pathologist, or a case worker in the foster care system.

However, a night watching “Love and Hip Hop” with a neighbor in her mom’s apartment complex led her in a completely new direction.

As they were watching the show, Davina’s neighbor warned her about the conditions in another neighbor’s apartment. Davina initially thought the neighbor was exaggerating and that the apartment was maybe a little messy.

“She’s like ‘no,’ you’re going to need a hazmat suit to go up there,” Davina said.

Davina said she was not prepared for what she saw once she entered the apartment, where she found both rodent and cockroach infestations.

“Pretty much every single thing you even tapped or moved had roaches coming out of it,” Davina said

Other people might have walked away at that moment, or called pest control or a professional cleaning service. Davina decided to clean the apartment herself because she said she was worried that someone would report the neighbor to the Administration for Children’s Services, which is New York City’s child protective services agency. Davina said she knew that this the agency had not only visited this neighbor, but had also sent a preventive services worker who did not appear to help.

“This preventive worker that she had didn’t particularly care about what happened with this lady or her kids,” Davina said.

Her relationship with the neighbor’s children and desire to make sure ACS wouldn’t separate them from their mom inspired her to clean the apartment and they were able to find humor in the mess.

“We had fun,” Davina said. “They found it so funny. I was scared of everything.”

Davina, who was still in college studying psychology at the time, realized the connections between the mental health conditions she was learning about and how conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder, struggles with executive function or destabilizing life events affect people’s ability to keep their homes clean. She saw a need for cleaning services in her community and started New York-based Compassionate Cleaning LLC.  

“Many people in my community have never hired or were able to hire a cleaning service out of fear of being judged, embarrassment, distrust or financial reasons,” Davina explains on Compassionate Cleaning’s homepage.

Davina said she makes sure to enforce compassion in all of her business practices. When training new cleaners, she always makes sure to bring them to clients’ homes for hands-on experiences. She shows them how she centers the clients’ preferences, such as asking about whether clients prefer that she hang or fold their clothes.

“I feel like the more hands on they are, the more they can understand how people think and how people think about their things,” Davina said.

Davina said she has prioritized building a nonjudgmental community on social media. She always asks her clients permission before posting “before and after” photos of their homes online. In her Instagram bio, she clearly states, in all capital letters, that her account is a “NO JUDGEMENT ZONE.”

Even with all these safeguards, she can’t always control negative comments.

“People in the comments (say things like), ‘This is disgusting, this person should be evicted,’ – all types of craziness,” Davina said. “Even suggesting that CPS is called, as if CPS is some type of peaches and rainbow agency.”

However, she said she extends the same empathy to the commenters that she does to her clients.

“It has to be something going on in their lives that they need compassion before and so I don’t reply to them,” Davina said.  

Sometimes though, she replies because she finds commenters who are genuinely curious. She shares educational content about mental health to encourage empathy and pins those responses to the top of the post to educate curious followers.

“They can still read that if they really want to know,” Davina said.