On Sept. 22, Gator-Aid handed out 80 water bottles to homeless folks they met during their one-mile mobile distribution walk through downtown Tucson. On Sep. 29, they handed out 104 waters. And on Oct. 6, they handed out 120 water bottles, along with 60 Slim Jims, 48 Gatorades and 44 sandwiches.
The mutual aid group, who pull wagons full of supplies like water, food and first aid through downtown each Sunday, has sometimes come close to running out of water bottles before they get to the Ronstadt Center bus station, often their busiest stop.
“Maybe since last summer, when it was really hot and brutal in August, and even more this past month, we have seen an uptick in folks,” said Gator-Aid member Bethany Bones, who keeps the group’s spreadsheet.
As a mutual aid group, Gator-Aid works on a philosophy of community members and peers supporting each other and meeting needs while building relationships. Their Sunday distribution is a big part of that, and also gives them a ground-level, week-by-week look into the needs of unhoused people on their regular distribution route in downtown Tucson.
“We are running out of things faster, and that to me says we are seeing more people. We see a lot of regulars we have been seeing all year, and more new faces,” said Bones.
Gator-Aid is not alone. Mutual aid groups including Unhoused Neighbors and Community Care Tucson, say they have seen rising needs in unsheltered communities who are coming to their regular distribution events.
They’ve struggled to meet the need, and say it’s part of a rising crisis in homeless communities.
“We have been seeing such a huge increase in the amount of people who need supplies,” said Liz Casey with Community Care Tucson.
City officials told Arizona Luminaria that they use the county level point-in-time count, which takes place every January, to assess how many unhoused people are in Tucson. The last two years of data have shown a drop in people who are living on the street unsheltered, and a rise in people in shelters, said Jason Thorpe, deputy director of Tucson’s Housing and Community Development Department.
The 2024 figures counted 2,102 people experiencing homelessness on Jan. 23, 2024 — 1,281 unsheltered and 821 in shelter. In 2023, the count identified 2,209 people — 1,501 unsheltered and 708 in shelter. The next count will take place in January 2025.
Mutual aid groups say they work to fill those gaps, and do so with a bigger political philosophy about community members exchanging resources to take care of each other.
“Mutual aid is changing me,” says Bones. She has been working with Gator-Aid regularly since last summer. That experience has broken down some of the barriers she had previously felt between housed and unhoused people, and taught her more about people’s specific situations. “It’s about centering the needs of people who I feel have been abandoned.”
How to get involved with mutual aid groups
Mutual aid groups are often looking for ongoing support with distributions, donations or other needs. Learn more here about some local groups:
Putting together the weekly distributions takes a handful of organizers who collaborate on storing and sourcing materials, cooking food and making sure they are there during the designated distribution times.
Somewhere between six and eight people pull several wagons with supplies around downtown Tucson each Sunday as part of Gator-Aid, though the group has managed with fewer in a pinch.
Community Care’s distribution of food, clothing, first aid and clean injection supplies at Armory Park on Wednesday nights takes between five and 20 people, says Casey. That sometimes includes unhoused people who help serve food or sort clothing.
For mutual aid groups, meeting the increased need in homeless communities means more pushes for donations, and more collaboration between different groups and nonprofits around the city.
On Wednesday, Oct. 30, Casey with Community Care estimates around 150 people attended the evening distribution at Armory Park. When the group first started in 2021, around 50 people would regularly come to their distributions. “We really see people who are not able to get their basic necessities met in other places. We hear people often say they haven’t eaten hot meals in several days.”
Community Care is always looking for new ways to bring resources to their distributions. They will have a table at the Desert Air Market on Nov. 16 to share about their work and take donations. They have also gotten donations of blankets from a city distribution available to nonprofit agencies.
Gator-Aid has offered two flavors of eegee’s as a summer treat on hot days during their distributions because one former member always paid the $50-some dollars it costs, but that was at risk as the group stretched their funds to meet the additional need. In recent weeks, they had requested donations on social media or worked with groups like Food Not Bombs Tucson to get what people needed.
Providing basic needs like toothpaste, electrolyte packets and a sandwich every week has also made Bones frustrated. “It shows me that the city is failing more people,” she says.
Thorpe, with the Housing and Community Development Department, said the scale of homelessness in Tucson means the city must work alongside churches, nonprofits and mutual aid groups to meet the need.
“We really view mutual aid groups and other organizations as being partners in the work and recognize that the challenge is much greater than the current resources allow.”
He also pointed to the city’s broader support efforts around housing. The city uses a Housing First approach to ending homelessness that creates minimal barriers to bringing people into transitional shelter and employs a street outreach team. The city also owns multiple hotels and a former convent that are used as emergency shelter and transitional housing, and runs a community development arm that has 1,200 units of affordable housing in planning stages.
At the same time, Tucson also has an enforcement protocol that has led to the city disbanding some encampments.
The homeless encampment protocol the city uses when deciding whether to remove people from a space can be initiated by a public complaint by phone or on its online reporting tool, according to the city manager’s office online. Encampments are assessed by three tiers, with the third being “high problem encampments,” and some encampments tagged for immediate removal. According to city data shared in a city council memorandum, 3,329 cases of encampments were created between October 2022 and October 2024.
Mutual aid organizers told Arizona Luminaria they are very aware of enforcement actions and how they impact people who come to their distributions. In recent months, the city cleared a large encampment in Santa Rita Park and Amphi Park was at risk of being closed down by a church that owned the land.
Still, advocates questions where people go after enforcement actions.
Ana Armijo, who used to camp at Santa Rita Park, told Arizona Luminaria after the encampment was moved that she would be spending the night “in an alley somewhere.”
Amina Tollin, whose group Unhoused Neighbors coordinates distributions at Santa Rita Park, said the group had been doubling the amount of resources they were trying to collect before people were moved out of Santa Rita.
“It dropped off a little bit when everybody was moved out of the park, but they’re coming back now,” said Tollin.
On the Unhoused Neighbors Instagram page, Tollin, who is a registered nurse, shares the reason she does that work. “There is not a human on earth that should experience food, clothing, housing or medical care insecurity,” she said.
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