Arizona Steps Up: A Landmark Morning on the Rio Salado Announces Arizona’s Environmental Convening
It began on the banks of the Rio Salado. Before a gathering of community leaders, elected officials, Indigenous land stewards, researchers, journalists, and environmental innovators, the Arizona Community Foundation, in partnership with the City of Phoenix, Arizona State University, and Desert Botanical Garden, officially announced Arizona's Environmental Convening, coming to downtown Phoenix on December 2 and 3, 2026.
What unfolded over the course of that morning was more than a press event. It was a demonstration of the very thing the Arizona's Environmental Convening is designed to make permanent: the right people, across every sector, every background, and every institution, deciding to move together.
Where the Day Began: The Ground Itself
The morning started outside, on the Rio Salado transformation site, where guests joined a blessing led by Lavern Jackson and the Protectors of the Salt River. The Transformation Site - one acre on the southern bank of the Salt River, just steps from the new Central Avenue light rail stop - is being co-created with the community for the community. It is the first in what we hope will be many anchor projects where Indigenous stewardship, city infrastructure, and philanthropic capital meet on the ground. The Transformation site is one of the living case studies the Arizona's Environmental Convening will center.
As guests made their way back toward the Audubon Center, the conversation was already alive. Neighbors, funders and frontline workers, researchers and grassroots organizers were all walking the same ground and talking about the same challenges. That walk told its own story about what collective action looks like when it starts where the work is actually happening.
Opening Remarks: Arizona as Proving Ground
ACF President and CEO Anna María Chávez opened the formal press conference, grounding the audience in both the history of the site and the urgency of the moment.
"Arizona is a proving ground for extreme heat solutions. What we build here, the models, the partnerships, the community-led innovations, can and should inform the rest of the country, and the world." - Anna María Chávez, President and CEO, Arizona Community Foundation
Chávez centered her remarks around the number that names the conference: on June 26, 1990, Phoenix hit 122 degrees Fahrenheit, a record that still stands. That figure, she said, is not just a data point. It is a threshold, a warning, and for Arizona, a call to action that the state is now answering together, at scale, and with urgency.
She connected the morning's outdoor experience directly to December's mission: local government, community leaders, universities, nonprofits, and philanthropy working on something real, tangible, and achievable, right here on a stretch of riverbank that has sustained communities for generations.
Voices from the Stage
Mayor Kate Gallego of the City of Phoenix spoke from the perspective of a city that has treated extreme heat not as a future threat but as a present operational reality, responding with urgency and innovation.
"By necessity, innovation and resilience are ingrained in everything we do in Phoenix. As communities around the world grapple with extreme heat and other complex challenges, we're proud to highlight proven solutions and eager to learn from the best ideas around our state and the world. In collaboration with ACF, ASU, dedicated residents, community organizations, and private sector partners, Phoenix is proud to host Arizona's Environmental Convening and to deliver globally relevant, local solutions." - Mayor Kate Gallego, City of Phoenix
In a signal of the global reach of Arizona's work, Jovita Neliušienė, Ambassador of the European Union to the United States, offered remarks from the stage, affirming that what is being built in Arizona carries international significance. Her presence at the press conference made clear that Arizona's Environmental Convening is not simply a regional convening. It is a global moment.
Aldo Gonzalez of the Protectors of the Salt River brought the weight of Indigenous knowledge and land stewardship to the stage, speaking to what the Rio Salado has meant for communities across generations and what protecting it means today.
The Panel: Where Vision Meets Practice
Wellington ‘Duke’ Reiter, FAIA, Senior Advisor to the President at Arizona State University and Founder and Executive Director of Ten Across, moderated an environmental panel that was one of the most substantive and wide-ranging conversations of the morning.
Five panelists brought institutional depth, frontline experience, and sector-spanning expertise to a conversation about what extreme heat resilience actually requires and what Arizona is already building.
Why Philanthropy? Why Now?
Taylor Pineda, ACF's Vice President of Community Engagement and Impact, opened the panel by articulating something that often goes unspoken in climate conversations: no single municipality, tribal community, or grassroots nonprofit can address extreme heat alone. The challenge is systemic, and so the response must be as well.
Pineda spoke to the role of a community foundation as a convener and a catalyst, uniquely positioned to identify where philanthropic investment can have an outsized, coordinated impact across sectors and geographies. ACF's approach, she explained, is to lift up and connect the leaders across Arizona who are already driving change and to channel more resources toward the work that is ready to scale. That, she said, is the spirit behind Arizona's Environmental Convening.
What Is Possible for Phoenix and Beyond?
Carla de la Chapa, Chief Sustainability Officer for the City of Phoenix, brought the perspective of a practitioner who understands that solutions have to be shaped by the communities they serve. Effective heat resilience means listening deeply and co-designing with residents, she noted, because what works in one community may look different in another.
De la Chapa spoke to Phoenix's vision of becoming a heat-adapted, people-centered city and to the signature initiatives already underway. The cultural wealth embedded in community design, she said, is not a footnote to the city's heat strategy. It is central to it.
Grassroots Leadership at Scale: The Coalition Model
Adriana Garcia Maximiliano, Co-Founder of Rumbo, spoke about what genuine community-rooted environmental leadership looks like from the inside. In Maryvale, Rumbo has been building a model designed to outlast any single leader or organizational cycle, one that translates community knowledge into systems change rather than program outputs.
What made her contribution particularly resonant was the integration of grassroots community leadership with international design expertise, demonstrating that local and global knowledge can work together. That model of community-led and globally informed collaboration is exactly what Arizona's Environmental Convening is designed to amplify.
Nature as Infrastructure for an Extreme Heat Future
Chris Kline, President and CEO of Desert Botanical Garden, offered a reframe that resonated with the room: the Garden is not just a museum or a conservation institution. It is a living demonstration of how desert ecosystems can inform urban heat adaptation at scale. Under its new strategic plan, the Garden has made extreme heat one of its core focus areas, with Arizona's Environmental Convening named as a priority Year 1 initiative.
Klein drew a direct line between conservation science and urban resilience, showing how efforts to protect desert plant life are inseparable from efforts to manage urban heat. The Garden's living collections, he explained, are among the city's most valuable heat mitigation assets.
National Reach, Local Impact
Dan Stellar, State Director for The Nature Conservancy in Arizona, spoke to the evolution of how a major conservation organization engages with urban heat challenges. TNC's work in Arizona has deepened its commitment to community-based heat resilience, recognizing that large-scale conservation efforts and direct neighborhood engagement reinforce each other rather than operate in parallel.
Stellar's remarks reflected something the panel kept returning to: that conservation and community are not separate tracks. The integration of national institutional capacity and grassroots-level work is exactly what Arizona's Environmental Convening is designed to support and scale.
The Role of Philanthropy in Making It Move
Taylor Pineda returned to close the panel by speaking to what Arizona's Environmental Convening is ultimately asking of the funders, institutions, and leaders who will gather in December. She unpacked what makes Arizona's Environmental Convening different from a conventional climate convening: it is designed around investment readiness, not just awareness. Projects arrive vetted, funding pathways are defined in advance, and the closing session culminates in a public announcement of pooled commitments.
The role of philanthropy, she said, is not to wait for consensus but to catalyze it. Arizona's Environmental Convening is the vehicle for doing exactly that.
What Arizona's Environmental Convening Will Be
Arizona's Environmental Convening is not a conventional climate event. It is a two-day action convening designed to move capital, not just conversation.
Projects arrive investment-ready. Funders arrive briefed. Every session is structured to build trust, surface shared priorities, and align capital around the solutions that are ready to move. The conference closes with a public announcement of pooled fund commitments, a shared declaration that Arizona's environmental leaders are ready to act together and that the resources are here to back them up.
Where most conferences build awareness, Arizona's Environmental Convening builds momentum. It is a two-day commitment to shared action, where the conversations that start in the room lead directly to the investments, partnerships, and scalable solutions that communities across Arizona and beyond have been waiting for. December 2 and 3, 2026 in downtown Phoenix is when that commitment becomes real.
Be Part of What Comes Next
Arizona's Environmental Convening takes place December 2 and 3, 2026 in downtown Phoenix. To learn more, click here.
If you are passionate about building Arizona’s environmental future, your support makes this work possible. Contribute to the Arizona Community Foundation’s Environmental Fund and help direct resources to the communities, organizations, and solutions on the front lines of extreme heat resilience.
Give to the Environmental Fund here.
To explore partnership opportunities with Arizona's Environmental Convening or learn more about the Arizona Resilience Project, contact Nicolas de la Fuente, Director of Environmental Strategy.
