From the Valley’s Hottest Blocks, a Cooler Future Takes Root

Drive west across Phoenix on a summer afternoon, past the bus stops and the blocks with little shade, and you reach Maryvale, a neighborhood that can run 5 to 7 degrees hotter than the rest of the Valley. Here, the heat is not a headline. It is a daily calculation. Parents wait until well past dark to take their children to the park. Older residents watch their morning walks disappear when the temperature climbs. Students feel the missing shade with every step to the bus.

Rumbo, a community-based nonprofit founded three years ago, exists to change that calculation. Its work begins not in a boardroom but on doorsteps, at kitchen tables, and in community meetings, where residents describe what they are living through and, just as importantly, what they want to build instead.

“Rumbo is a community-based nonprofit where we envision that desert communities can thrive in a cooler world, where we can do the things that we want to do, even as we’re facing extreme heat.”
—Adriana Garcia Maximiliano, Co-Founder, Rumbo

That vision is grounded in what residents report. Through door-to-door surveys and house meetings, Rumbo hears the same themes again and again: older residents whose mental health slips over a summer without their morning walks, students who feel the missing shade on the walk to the bus, families weighing utility bills that climb with the temperature, and the public life that quietly narrows when the outdoors becomes off-limits.

“When it’s 110 degrees outside, we’ve had conversations with parents who told us they can’t take their kids out to the park until very late at night.”
—Adriana Garcia Maximiliano, Co-Founder, Rumbo

Those conversations became something residents could stand under. With support from the Arizona Community Foundation, Rumbo and community members planted 50 new trees together at a neighborhood park, an early and visible win that kicked off its Resilient Phoenix campaign, the organization’s community-led effort to turn Maryvale residents’ experiences with extreme heat into solutions, investments, and a roadmap for a cooler, safer city. Residents worked side by side with the city’s parks department, learning how tree loss, aging canopy, and water infrastructure shape where and when a neighborhood can cool down.

The reason that work matters is direct.

“Shade structures and trees and things that can cool down an area are super important in places like Maryvale, because Maryvale experiences some of the highest heat in the Valley. It can be up to 5 to 7 degrees hotter.”
—Adriana Garcia Maximiliano, Co-Founder, Rumbo

This is where ACF and its community of donors made the difference. The hardest dollars to find are the early ones, the flexible support that turns community input into a project on the ground. ACF funding helped Rumbo launch the tree planting and the surveys that opened its Resilient Phoenix campaign, and it connected Rumbo to a wider network of leaders doing this work across the state.

That network came together through ACF’s midyear Environmental Accelerator, where Rumbo joined organizations from across Arizona and traveled to the Hopi Reservation to see how another community is shaping its own future. Garcia Maximiliano came away struck by a lesson her own team knows well: this work takes time, and the time is worth it when it means bringing more people in. The gathering is one of the building blocks of ACF’s Arizona’s Environmental Convening, the statewide event on extreme heat solutions coming to downtown Phoenix in December 2026. For Rumbo, the value was in the relationships and in a shared conviction that the best answers come from the people closest to the problem.

Garcia Maximiliano is direct about what she wants donors to understand. Residents are proud of Maryvale, and they are ready to partner. What they are asking for is not charity but company, neighbors from beyond the neighborhood who will help build the shade and the civic infrastructure the community has already envisioned for itself.

“Investing in Maryvale is investing in one of the most affected communities by our rising temperatures here in Phoenix.”
—Adriana Garcia Maximiliano, Co-Founder, Rumbo

Ask Garcia Maximiliano what the future looks like, and she does not describe a policy. She describes people, and a neighborhood shaping its own path. Rumbo, fittingly, means a course to a destination, and the organization keeps asking a single question of its neighbors and its city: which course will we choose to take?

“I think about the moms in our community who want to take their kids to a park and want a shady area to be able to watch and play soccer, and them having that space.”
—Adriana Garcia Maximiliano, Co-Founder, Rumbo

What makes it last is leadership. Rumbo is investing in the residents themselves, the students stepping into leadership roles and the parents learning how to bring their voices to council meetings and elected officials. The aim is for the work to outlive any single campaign or organization, so the projects a community wants can keep coming to life long after the trees are in the ground.

At the Arizona Community Foundation, community is our middle name, and it is also our strategy. When donors invest in strategic focus areas like the environment, alongside education and housing, they invest in the people, partnerships, and places that make Arizona stronger for everyone.

To the donors who have already stepped forward, thank you. Your generosity is the reason 50 trees now shade a Maryvale park, and the reason a neighborhood on the front line of extreme heat is writing its own cooler future.

Learn more about Rumbo’s work in Maryvale, including its Resilient Phoenix report, at rumbos.io.

Give today. Support the Environmental Fund and help community-driven solutions to extreme heat take root in the Arizona neighborhoods that need them most.

Support Arizona’s environmental future. Invest in ACF’s Environmental Fund→.