It may not have been easy exactly, but it was more manageable for Tree Lafferty to spend Arizona summers unhoused when she was younger. As Lafferty aged, sitting on the hot concrete, or being nudged along from shady downtown spaces, felt harder to take. “I was a lot stronger,” said Lafferty, 61. “There was much less pain involved.”
Last year was the first time she used a cooling center, and she wandered into the one run by St. Francis Community Services from the Ward 3 council office in part because the center is managed by a longtime friend.
“That summer, the favorite number of the weather forecaster was 108,” she laughed. “I didn’t know cooling centers were a thing [until I heard about] this one.”
Last year, the cooling center was able to stay open through October, when the temperature hit an unusual fall level of 100 degrees because the Ward 3 council office used leftover COVID relief money to help stretch operations for an extra month.
This year, between more competition for fewer grants and a sparser donation landscape, that money is gone.
“Nonprofits are really struggling,” said Shawn Milligan, director of operations of St. Francis Community Services. “Funding is scarce, and with a lot of grants that we have gone for, there are at least twice as many other folks going for that same money.”
While Southern Arizona shimmers under the extreme heat of summer, the cooling center is not alone in its resource crunch. Senior serving institutions aid some of the most heat-vulnerable community members, and amid the dip in people who stay in town and fewer federal grants this year, they are doing that work with less money and less support on the ground.
Nonprofits and governments are collaborating more to fill that gap, even as they stare down a challenge of extreme heat that climate data suggests will only get worse.
As temperatures ticked up this summer, the Eastside Neighbors Volunteer Program, which connects volunteer drivers with seniors in Tucson needing help accessing groceries or support getting to doctor’s appointments, has seen its volunteer ranks thin as snowbirds escape the extreme summer heat.
“We lose so many of our drivers — they get the heck out of Tucson,” said Becky Noel, the group’s executive director. “It puts a hardship on us.”
Donations to AllThrive 365, a Phoenix-area nonprofit working with seniors around the state, drop in the summer as many locals leave for the season. That’s exactly when the organization’s phones begin ringing off the hook with emergency cooling repair requests during the stretches of 100-plus degree heat.
“The need always outweighs the funding,” Elena Burr, the director of communications and outreach, said. “The lowest donation month is the highest need we see.”
As Trump administration cuts hollow out the social safety net and slow federal heat-relief funding, Southern Arizona’s nonprofits are being forced into a bigger, under-resourced frontline role protecting seniors from increasingly deadly, increasingly long summers
In 2024, Tucson had 112 days of 100 degree-plus heat, more than any year on record so far, according to the National Weather Service. In 2025, Tucson hit 100 degrees April 11, more than a week earlier than the previous record of April 19 in 1989. That record was broken in 2026, when Tucson had its first 100-degree day in March.
“It’s one of those invisible disasters. It doesn’t have this start and end — it’s a long duration event,” said Courtney Slanaker, head of the American Red Cross of Southern Arizona chapter. “For us, we’ve always been that disaster response agency where you see people’s boots on the ground right after impact. With heat it’s very hard to define — our job is really to communicate effective risk strategies.”
Doing more with less
As access to federal grants shrinks and need rises, nonprofits have become a crucial part of public heat relief work in Arizona, becoming governmental partners whose engagement is built into the process.
Here are some ways local governments are partnering with nonprofits.
“With the new administration and a lot of cuts in funding, that wasn’t a choice: we needed to work together. Everybody’s funding was reduced,” city of Tucson chief resilience officer Fatima Luna said.
For example, in 2025 the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation lost $1.5 million in funds from a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services program that funds clinical and support services for people with HIV and AIDS
“No single institution can do heat work alone. That’s just unrealistic. Nonprofits and partnerships play a huge role.”
In Phoenix, AllThrive 365 is the 2026 distribution partner for the city of Phoenix heat relief program.
In the city of Tucson’s Heat Action Roadmap, adopted in 2024, nonprofit partners can develop and distribute culturally relevant informational materials, work on long-term greening projects and possibly apply for funding with local government.
Pima County’s 2026 heat plan identifies local nonprofits as partners for targeted outreach to particularly vulnerable populations like unhoused people and those who live in mobile homes — both groups with the highest risk of heat-related deaths.
In 2025, the Pima County Health Department launched a Heat Relief Grant Program specifically to support organizations working with unhoused women, using funding obtained through the state health department. The county also gave funding to local shelter Sister Jose’s Women’s Center to improve outdoor shading, and to Primavera Foundation to reduce heat illness among women living in STAR Village, the city’s outdoor safe living space.
This last year, a significant portion of the cooling center funding in Pima County was underwritten by federal dollars from the Center for Disease Control, but those are set to expire next year. (The Pima County Board of Supervisors is moving to use general funds moving ahead for that effort.)
Liza Kurtz is a senior research analyst with the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University. She has studied extreme heat indoors and outdoors but is currently completing a study of indoor heat in Maricopa County.
She called the current funding landscape in which American Rescue Plan Act funds were ending a looming financial cliff.
“The good news is it’s not something anyone has their heads in the sand about.”
Kurtz has seen a growing connection between government and nonprofits working on heat issues, from the state to local level.
“Nonprofits and community advocates, faith-based organizations, are the people who are closest to the folks that are affected,” Kurtz said. “I see a lot of reporting back to larger infrastructure [and government] from nonprofits.”
In September 2025, the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona surveyed local nonprofit organizations to see how they were faring amid the waves of federal cuts. While private donations and grants accounted for about half of nonprofit funding, nearly one year into the Trump administration, government grants from all levels was generally 27.5% of nonprofit funding.
With the widespread federal cuts under the Trump administration, about 15-20% of the organizations surveyed reported layoffs, while a majority of nonprofits surveyed (60-65%) said they had left open positions unfilled, reduced staff hours or implemented a hiring freeze.
On the funder side, Krista Millay, with the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona, said they are seeing extreme heat as an issue that touches almost everything, and have tried to think about funding support for it in the same way.
“Rather than thinking about heat as a separate funding category, we see it as something that cuts across many different issues.”
Also complicating the reality is that, while Southern Arizona is “incredibly generous,” Millay said, it is a different philanthropic market than Phoenix, 100-some miles to the north. “We have fewer Fortune 500 companies and fewer large corporate foundations, so our nonprofit community often depends on a broader mix of individual donors, local philanthropy, public funding, and collaboration.”
That has meant more collaboration, Millay says. “There’s a recognition that no one funder or nonprofit can solve our biggest challenges alone. Collaboration isn’t just a nice idea here — it’s often how progress gets made,” she said.
Still, collaboration can’t fully get past real resource constraints.
“One thing we talk about often is that philanthropy can do a lot, but it can’t do everything. Private philanthropy isn’t large enough to replace government funding,” Millay said.
Turning off the AC
In 2025, 117 people in Pima County died of heat-related causes, according to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office. Two-thirds— 78 people — were over the age of 60. Of all the deaths, 42% occurred indoors
One key cause: cooling is often one of the first costs people cut back on — turning off their AC altogether or letting a broken unit go unrepaired.
“If you’re dealing with an illness, or you’re dealing with food insecurity or housing insecurity, it is very difficult to think about: how do I protect myself from a disaster or a heat event,” Slanaker said.
For a mix of reasons, Arizona had among the highest drop in the number of people receiving SNAP assistance: a drop of 54 percent from July 2025 to May 2026, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Kurtz, with ASU, has seen that play out across the state: if you used to get food aid but it was cut, you may cut back on how often you run your air conditioner.
“It’s very likely some of the money they don’t spend on food or rent will shift to paying bills,” she said. “It’s hard to track down exactly which money is going towards keeping people safe from extreme heat, and in some ways it’s all of it.”
A 2026 study by the Urban Institute found that one in three adults aged 60 or older had trouble paying their rent, mortgage or utility bills.
Angela Murphy, who runs the cooling center at Ward 3, said last summer, as Arizona’s SNAP participation began dropping precipitously, the center started drawing more than unhoused residents — also people avoiding cooling costs or needing more food than they had at home.
“I don’t want to turn people away, but we are not a nutrition assistance program. We are a cooling center. It really was like a senior center – and a lot of people were coming to get food,” she said. “When it’s harder to buy food, you’re going to spend less on AC.”
Murphy manages the center every day, coordinating cold drinks and food, but she also invites local nonprofits to come and hold office hours. Primavera may come through in the morning, then CODAC in the afternoon.
Murphy also knows the cost of heat stress well: even as she works at the cooling center she is concerned about the cost of cooling her own home.
Her partner works nights and is therefore resting during the day with their dogs. “We have to have it [the AC] on at all times. And there are still rooms in the house that are not cool. The bathrooms [are] over 100 degrees,” says Murphy. “It’s literally everybody across the city.”
More flexible funding
Fundraisers and managers say local nonprofits are looking not only for more funding, but money that they can use flexibly.
“When you get restricted dollars, it really ties the organization’s hands on being innovative and course correcting,” Slanaker said. “There’s times when you get into a program and you’re like, man, I really need a shift. But you’re restricted by your funder’s guidelines or expectations.”
Milligan of St. Francis Community Services said his organization’s accountant is a volunteer, making any onerous reporting requirement for grants almost not worth the staff time it would take to apply or do detailed grant reporting.
Tina Lopez, vice president of philanthropic services at Jewish Family & Children’s Services, said she tries to avoid restricted grants when possible, and to communicate that paying for staff and salaries is key to supporting the work of nonprofit organizations. “It’s like going into Starbucks and buying a cup of coffee and saying: I only want to pay for the beans for the coffee and the water that goes in it, I don’t want to pay for your salary, or the building that I’m coming into to get coffee.”
Like the need for flexible funding, some of the best tools to protect seniors amid extreme heat are about investing in a stronger social safety net writ large, a type of work that often doesn’t easily fall into any one funding bucket.
“Heat is not going away for Southern Arizona, so if we can [we should] build that social cohesion for adults or seniors living alone,” said Slanaker of the Red Cross, describing neighbors who would notice if an older resident had not been in contact for a few days.
“When you look at disaster trends from across the country and even globally, communities that have really tight social cohesion or social connection at a neighborhood level actually bounce back faster and are able to mobilize resources quicker than your kind of traditional response agencies.”
On the ground, collaborative efforts have gotten creative. The Red Cross and local government partners are door knocking with heat kits and informational flyers about how to recognize heat illness this year. Tucson has also been running “Heat Lotería” games, a play on the traditional Mexican bingo-esque contest, to teach people about heat illness prevention in council officers and homeless shelters.
As this summer’s temperature hit 100-plus degrees for multiple days, Lafferty has been living in an apartment with the help of federally subsidized housing, which she secured after speaking at City Council about “abominable” treatment of homeless people trying to survive outside.
In the heat of the summer this year, she stays in her air conditioned home and eats a lot of fruit. She also muses on how to stay healthy, given a heart attack she had two years before, also amid the heat of the desert summer. Extreme temperatures can increase risk for people with heart conditions.
“I’m real big on bananas and avocados because they’re high in potassium,” she says. “The lion share of my heart attack was because of low potassium.”
She’s also making sure not to run her air conditioner too high — even as she gets a low-income utility payment subsidy, Lafferty is still paying off an old electric bill from the time she was briefly housed in 2019.
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