Arizona city punishes charity workers for giving away free food
Our communities are the building blocks of society. Whether neighbors, churches, family, or the family we create from our friends, our communities shape who we are. They also serve as core support systems. It is through these connections that we know what it means to be human.
For 25-year-old Austin Davis, his love for his community is the driving force behind everything he does. Austin has spent the past five years running Arizona Hugs, a group that provides meals and support for Tempe’s homeless population. He didn’t wake up one morning and decide on a whim to get into charity work; his call to serve arose organically as he built personal relationships with the homeless community. While attending Arizona State University, Austin would skate to class and around town, which is how he got to know the folks he lovingly refers to as his “homies.”
Austin Davis
Much of the homeless population lived in an area of town known as the river bottom, which most people avoid. But Austin was always welcome and soon became a regular fixture down there. When the community showed Austin that they trusted him, he told them, “I want to show that same trust right back at you.” Above all, Austin wanted to impart a sense of community. As he says, “The best way for someone to get off drugs or work through their trauma is to create a stable, safe environment where their basic needs are met, and they feel safe enough to trust the people around them.”
Moeur Park
After working with a few other local groups, Austin formed Arizona Hugs (AZ Hugs). “I just thought that at the heart of it, what everyone needs is a hug and just that human connection. And it’s really as simple as that with the name, Arizona Hugs,” he says. His group served food to the homeless community in Moeur Park on Sundays and also helped them secure mental health treatment, access to addiction treatment, haircuts, social services, temporary housing, and jobs. Austin even formed relationships with his community members’ families and made frequent calls to keep them updated on their wellbeing.
Austin’s work is hands on and the people he feeds are his friends and his family.
“What I realized out on the streets is a lot of folks either don’t have family or they’re not connected to their family,” he says. “The most important thing that we can offer someone on the streets is building family for each other.”
Such strong bonds make the work more meaningful, but deeper connections beget deeper wounds when the community experiences loss. Many of his friends have struggled with substance abuse, and Austin has lost more than a few to overdoses. He fondly remembers one of his friends who recently passed: A talented artist, the man once worked as a tattoo artist before his drug addiction put him out on the streets. Once, during a period when the man was sober, he gave Austin a tattoo, which now serves as a beautiful tribute to their friendship.
Austin displays his tattoo done by his recently deceased friend
Austin has dedicated his entire life to helping his community and his community has supported him in return. “I don’t get paid for the AZ HUGS work,” he says.
That’s why these last couple of years have been incredibly difficult. But I’ve been supported by the community. For example, I didn’t have a vehicle, so the soup kitchen gave me their old bus. The bus broke down, so the founder of this rehab gave me his old Corolla to drive around.
Through this help, he has been able to continue serving the homeless population of Tempe full time.
But these days, you won’t see Austin in the park handing out meals because he has been banned from doing so.
The special event fee
The City of Tempe has a law that requires a “special event” permit for certain public events. To obtain a permit, applicants must pay a $50 application fee, a $100 special event fee “for each day of operation,” and an event space rental fee per day that can range from $125 to $1,500 for non-commercial events. Even once these requirements are fulfilled, the City can still deny the permit. Typically, this law has applied to events like concerts—not meal service for the homeless. There are nonprofit groups serving meals in the park every single day of the week. Requiring hundreds of dollars of fees for each event isn’t feasible for groups like Austin’s, which at one time was serving meals nearly every day of the week. Worse still, anyone who continues serving meals without obtaining a permit faces criminal charges, as Austin learned the hard way.
Food service for Tempe’s homeless community
Austin attempted to apply for a permit, but was told by the City that he would have to discontinue meal service for 60 days while his permit was being considered. Austin’s first duty is to his community. The City, he felt, had put him in a position where he had to choose between his moral obligations and obeying the law. Ultimately, he accepted the risks and continued serving meals.
The City cited Austin every single weekend that AZ Hugs continued to provide meals. Eventually, he was barred from entering any Tempe public park and was subsequently cited for trespassing every time he continued to show up.
The situation escalated in July 2024, when officers arrested Austin while he was picking up dinner supplies. (He hadn’t even gotten to the park yet.) Austin was treated like a criminal and forced to spend the night in jail. The next morning, the Tempe Municipal Court judge released him without bail on the condition that he did not step foot in a public park.
This situation is especially absurd when you factor in the “Neighborhood Event of the Year” award the City had given Austin in March 2022 in recognition of his picnics in the park. The same meal service worthy of praise before was now grounds for arrest. But the City didn’t stop doling out punishments. Austin is a poet and teaches free poetry classes at the local library. After his arrest, the library banned Austin from teaching his classes because of his failure to comply with other City rules—a completely unrelated matter.
By September 2024, Austin faced 34 charges of trespassing. He would have had no problem continuing service in spite of it all, but he didn’t have the financial resources to keep paying citations or fighting in court. Not to mention, his friends and family were growing concerned. Feeling as though he had no other choice, he took a plea bargain to avoid serving more time in jail. At the time, he did not know organizations like Pacific Legal Foundation were ready and willing to help him.
A month later, Austin was dropping off water and ice for the homeless just outside of the park, where he was allowed to be, when he noticed an altercation between two homeless individuals. He instinctively stepped in to de-escalate the situation, and after he had smoothed things over, he stepped onto a sidewalk that was technically considered part of the park. Law enforcement were called in and he was arrested once again.
While others have continued to provide meals, Austin has been relegated to an abandoned bus stop just across the street where he looks on from afar, making sure his community has what they need even if he cannot be with them.
Ron and Jane
Austin wasn’t the only person arrested over the permit ordinance. Seventy-eight-year-old Ron Tapscott is a retired social worker who has built a career around helping others. Around the time he retired, he began doing community activism with a group he helped start, called Tempe Neighborhoods Together. The organization was built around organizing community activists to deal with municipal government, infrastructure, and development issues. Realizing how substantial the homeless issue had become, Ron began to shift his focus in that direction.
Now he works with New Deal Meal, another local group, to provide food for the homeless in the same park as AZ Hugs. Like Austin, Ron was warned that he would face punishment if he did not obtain a permit and still continued to serve. He was cited but not arrested.
Jane Parker is also retired and has devoted her time to serving Tempe’s homeless through her organization H.O.P.E. Arizona. In addition to giving meals, Jane collects all sorts of items that the community may need, like toiletries, clothes, and even bikes. Unlike Austin, Jane is older and doesn’t feel like she can risk being thrown in jail, so she has done what she can to continue helping without breaking the permit ordinance. But she is fighting back in her own way.
Jane Parker and her van full of donations for Tempe’s homeless community
Jane addressed city council members during a meeting, pleading with them to correct their behavior and drop the charges against Austin. She had never spoken in public before, but you wouldn’t know it, watching the footage. As she remembers it, “I was scared half out of my mind, but I knew I had to do it, and you could hear in my voice the emotion.”
Terrifying as it was, she thought to herself, “You know what? If we don’t get involved, things are not going to change.”
As of now, her pleas, along with Austin’s and Ron’s, have fallen on deaf ears. After Ron’s arrest, the City claimed in a statement that it was actively working to provide aid to the homeless. True, they have worked to provide shelter, but there is still a dire need for food service that the City has not been able to meet. According to Ron,
When the first shelter was opened, the City subcontracted to a group to manage it, and the people that were doing the ground experience there didn’t even know where to find food for people. So the only food that’s provided are people in our coalition that go twice a month to provide food. Other than that, people are on their own.
Jane, Austin, and Ron have tried to help the government fill the gaps, yet their acts of kindness are being criminalized. The government does not have a monopoly on charity, nor do they have the resources to adequately meet the community’s needs.
Jane, Ron, and Austin sit on bench across from Moeur Park
The Constitution protects the right of every individual to pursue their calling without coming up against government roadblocks, especially when those roadblocks serve no credible public interest. On the contrary, the application and enforcement of the event permits for meal service goes against the public interest by limiting the resources needed by the city’s most vulnerable communities.
Pacific Legal Foundation is helping Austin, Ron, and Jane challenge the unconstitutional permit requirement.
Ron feels thankful to have PLF in his court. “It makes me feel blessed. I mean, this can be a very lonely battle, and I think having this level of support with people with the resources that you all bring to this, I think gives us a lot more hope than we may have had without it.”
Austin also expressed his gratitude for knowing there is someone willing to fight with him.
I didn’t think that this was a possibility—that’s one of the reasons we felt we had to take the plea. I don’t have any money and I don’t have any way to effectively combat the City in this capacity. They have more power and money and time and resources than I do, a hundred percent.
He continued, “I’m eternally grateful for all of you for taking this case and working with me, and I can’t express my gratitude enough, really.”
When asked what winning the case would mean to him, Austin said, “It would mean the world to me because the streets are my world.”
Criminalizing charity does nothing to benefit communities, and the special permits law is not just taking food out of the mouths of those who need it the most—it’s also illegal. But PLF is working to restore Ron, Jane, and Austin’s right to serve.
Austin Davis looks toward the park where he is now banned
