The Sedona Area Homeless Alliance unveiled its new mobile outreach bus at the Sedona Public Library on the morning of Monday, July 31. The bus will provide basic necessities such as food, clothing, and toiletries to Sedona’s homeless and transient population.

SAHA currently serves 200 year-round homeless residents, a number that has remained consistent for the last five years and hundreds of additional unhoused transients.

“It took us a minute to get here, meaning about seven and a half years,” SAHA co-founder Laurie Moore said. “We were in a building at one point and they did not renew our lease. So we had to depend on street outreach completely. Although we can serve so few people that way. This [bus] is what we need to do till we get back in a building.”

The bus will be set up at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church from 4:30 until 6:30 p.m. every Monday. Meal service will be provided by the church at its regularly-scheduled times. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, the bus will be parked at the Sedona Public Library beginning at 10 a.m. to provide meal service. The schedule at SPL is likely to vary with the seasons and weather.

“In the beginning, we are going to start with these three days to prompt our clients to come on those specific days to form that habit, which is healthy to do,” Moore said. “We will likely be at Sunset Park two days a week. More than likely not Posse Grounds, because there are so many community events there. We want to be careful about how we’re presenting this, and looking at unintended consequences.”

The bus will allow SAHA to distribute nonperishable goods, and SAHA is also partnering with Manzanita Outreach to provide fresh produce. In addition, the bus will allow volunteers to prepare hot meals ahead of time so that they can hand out “simple on-the-go meals” on board the bus.

“We won’t have tables and chairs and it’s not [set up] so that people have to consume their meal [at the bus]. It actually is a walk-away meal,” Moore said. “We don’t think littering is an issue with the people that we serve. We have a lot of people that we know that go around and pick up garbage. Traditionally, the people we serve are pretty respectful about throwing trash away.”
In order to receive food and make use of services offered through the bus, homeless residents have to sign up for SAHA’s services, which includes signing a liability waiver.

The bus was donated by Bob Gillman. It required an additional $9,000 worth of retrofitting work, which was made possible by a $5,000 grant from the city of Sedona, a $2,000 gift from Helen Jarnes, and a $2,000 gift from St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church.

SAHA received its city grant toward the bus during last year’s Small Grant Program funding process. This year, SAHA will receive $15,000, which will be used to fund its “Code Blue” which provides hotel rooms for those of Sedona’s homeless residents who have been SAHA clients for over three years when nighttime temperatures fall below 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

During this year’s budget work session, the city council briefly discussed the possibility of increasing the funding cap for the Small Grants Program. Twenty-nine local nonprofits had applied for $374,022 in funding from the program, which was limited to making a total of $200,000 in grants. Stephanie Giesbrecht, chairwoman of the Small Grants Citizen Work Group, estimated that $350,000 would allow the nonprofits “to grow their programs and not only help more of their target population, but potentially in an even more impactful way.”

“We’re going to discuss it in January when we set our priorities for next year,” Vice Mayor Holli Ploog said. “But from the discussion on the dais, I think that there is a desire to increase the amount of funding [to small grants]. To what level, I don’t know.”