Tucson nonprofits work in partnership to confront community challenges | News

For Malea Chavez, the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona is more than just a workplace. As a child, Chavez’s family was among the many in Tucson who relied on the 48-year-old organization’s services.

“My mom was a social worker for many years in Tucson, and as a kid, I used to go with her to pick up boxes at the food bank and deliver them to a lot of the families that she worked with,” she recalled. “And then later on, when my mom divorced my stepdad and was a single mom with two kids, we became beneficiaries of the Community Food Bank services ourselves.”

Now, as CEO of the very organization that once helped her family, Chavez is living proof of the “full-circle” journey that many in the nonprofit world experience.

“Throughout my entire career, even as an attorney, I’ve always felt like there was a big connection between having food security and a sense of empowerment for folks,” said Chavez, who worked at legal self-help centers in Oakland for the Superior Court of California before returning to her native Tucson in 2022. “It’s a gift to be able to bring that kind of stability and support into any community.”

Chavez’s personal journey from food bank beneficiary to CEO underscores a broader theme in Tucson’s nonprofit sector: a deep understanding of the issues they address, often born from lived experience. In interviews with key figures from five of Tucson’s largest nonprofits, it’s clear that these personal connections foster a collaborative spirit among the city’s nonprofit leaders, as many have experienced firsthand the importance of holistic support. 

“I think Tucson is a very collaborative environment, which is wonderful!” said Chavez. “There’s a lot of partnership here. We work with organizations like Interfaith Community Services, Primavera Foundation and many others to provide the support our community needs.”

Together, Tucson’s nonprofit organizations form an interconnected web that provides a comprehensive safety net for the city’s most vulnerable populations. From addressing basic needs like food security to offering crucial behavioral health services and educational programs, these nonprofits ensure that no challenge is faced in isolation.

Brittany Smith, communications director at Youth On Their Own (YOTO), said her organization focuses on helping homeless and vulnerable youth in Pima County graduate high school by offering monthly stipends based on student attendance (up to $350 depending on their need and school attendance), and a mini-mall where students can get essential items like food, hygiene products, school supplies and household goods for free. 

But they also guide students to other services that can help them navigate bureaucratic hurdles like obtaining a driver’s license or securing housing.

“We connect our kids to other resources for some of the things we don’t do,” she said. “Pretty much anything they need, we’ll try to guide them along the way.”

Health, particularly in lower-income areas, is often seen as having social determinants, such as housing, childcare, transportation and food insecurity. Clinton Kuntz, CEO of El Rio Health, prefers the term “social drivers of health,” emphasizing that these factors are not deterministic but rather influential. 

“I don’t believe housing or any of those things determine your health outcome,” he said. “They are definitely drivers that influence it, but the person has a lot of control there.”

Nevertheless, he also sees the importance of partnering with other nonprofits to address the broader social factors that impact health outcomes.

“We can’t always meet those social needs, but we try to partner with others in the community who do,” Kuntz said. “There’s a great nonprofit community that works here, in housing, food insecurity and other areas. There’s generally somebody in each of those areas that we partner with, and we have teams that go out together and meet people where they’re at.”

Yissel Salafsky, CEO of Make Way for Books, said her early literacy nonprofit works with families and children aged 0 to 5, with a strong emphasis on school readiness and third-grade reading proficiency. But she adds that collaborative efforts with educational and community organizations are key to providing early literacy support to underserved families.

“We partner with the Arizona Department of Education, United Way and First Things First,” Salafsky said. “These relationships are critical to moving the needle in terms of kindergarten readiness and third-grade reading outcomes.”

And Favin Gebremariam, VP of development and PR for Casa de los Niños, an organization that focuses on the prevention, intervention and treatment of trauma in children and families, emphasizes that partnerships with local agencies helps ensure families receive holistic care that includes behavioral health, parenting programs and early education.

“We’ve really rounded the corner to being an organization that focuses on the family,” she said. “But it’s about making sure the family gets access to the support they need, often through our partnerships with other agencies in town.”

Besides working with other agencies, each of these nonprofits has expanded the services they offer in-house, acknowledging that vulnerable populations often face interconnected challenges, and a single type of service is rarely enough to achieve lasting stability.

Casa de los Niños, founded in 1973 by Sister Kathleen Clark, originally served as a crisis shelter for children facing abuse and neglect. Today that same location serves as the hub for a comprehensive support system, offering a wide range of services supporting both children and families.

“We very quickly realized that you can’t just protect children for a period and then, when their parents are ready to have them back, send them back into a dangerous situation,” said Gebremariam. “It’s not just about the children, it’s about the family unit as a whole.”

The center now offers eight distinct programs, focusing not just on sheltering children from trauma but addressing the causes and solutions. “How do you prevent the trauma from happening? How do you intervene when it does happen? And if the trauma has already occurred, what does that treatment look like? How do we get healthy again?” said Gebremariam.

El Rio Health’s CEO emphasizes that their integrated care model allows patients to access a full range of health services all in one location, making it easier for vulnerable populations to receive comprehensive care, regardless of their ability to pay.

“Our care model is an integrated care model where you can get medical, behavioral and dental all in one location,” said Kuntz. “And your physicians and the teams all talk to each other and we handle the referrals. So it’s an integrated, whole person care model. And our quality metrics stack up to the best private physician office and the best academic center out there.”

Make Way for Books complements its work promoting early childhood literacy by also addressing the socioeconomic and emotional development of young children, helping prevent future academic and social challenges by integrating education into the broader scope of family and community well-being.

“Education is one of the few things that really changes the narrative for an individual in terms of being able to get a good job, get housing and so on,” said Salafsky. “It impacts a lot. So we work with childcare providers, particularly in low income zip codes where they don’t often have a teaching background, to get them all the learning components they need to run their time with the kids more like a preschool.”

Focusing on the whole person in nonprofit services also fosters that deep sense of connection and gratitude that inspires beneficiaries to return as volunteers, employees or donors to give back to the community that once supported them.

“We have a couple of staff members who have been in the program,” Smith noted, highlighting how YOTO’s impact on students’ lives (the program has a graduation rate of 86%) leads them to come back as employees, paying forward the support they once received. They also hear back from a lot of alumni, inspiring current students with their personal stories.

“We always love to hear from alums, kind of what they’re doing out in the community,” said Smith. “And we’ve had a lot of success stories” — many featured on YOTO’s website.

Chavez said her full-circle story is not the only one at the Community Food Bank, which last year served 160,492 people and distributed 402,352 emergency food bags, each one packed by a team of volunteers.

“We have many people who choose to give back and also work at the food bank because they were beneficiaries of the program when they were younger,” she said. “And then, of course, we get the people who bring their children or family members and are kind of instilling this sense of service — it’s just a beautiful thing to witness.”

For Gebremariam, she said it’s always a thrill to see an alumnus visit Casa de los Niños and flash back on when they were on those 50-year-old grounds.

“We’ve grown and changed, but we’re still at the original location of the crisis shelter,” she said. “Some of the most special interactions we have is when we get people who spent time at the shelter and have gone on to become incredibly successful people. They come back and they take the walk through where they used to live or where they used to spend a lot of time, and that’s kind of when it all clicks.

“You get to see the full circle of what someone is capable of,” she added. “It’s very cool.”