When Every Minute Matters
Every year, Arizona's sheriffs lead hundreds of search-and-rescue missions across deserts, mountains, rivers, forests, and remote backcountry. Whether it's a lost child, an injured hiker, a stranded motorist, or a visitor in distress, sheriffs and their volunteer search-and-rescue teams answer the call when lives are on the line.
Your support helps fund training and advocacy for rescue operations across Arizona — ensuring that help is always ready when the next call comes.
Gifts to the Arizona Sheriffs' Foundation help fund search-and-rescue equipment, training, and operations across the state.
The mission
Arizona is among the most demanding search-and-rescue environments in the nation. Its fifteen counties span low desert and high country, river corridors and national forest, canyon lands and remote backcountry — terrain where summer heat, winter storms, and sheer distance can turn an ordinary outing into an emergency within hours.
In Arizona, responsibility for search and rescue rests with the sheriff of each county. When a call comes in, the sheriff's office coordinates the response: deputies, aviation and ground assets, and trained volunteer search-and-rescue teams working under sheriff command. These volunteers — climbers, medics, pilots, trackers, and handlers of search dogs and mounted units — give their time, and often their own equipment, to bring their neighbors home.
Missions range from wilderness searches and technical rope rescues to swiftwater operations and desert extractions. Each one depends on people who are trained, equipped, and ready before the call ever comes.
Where your support goes
Contributions to the Association in support of search and rescue are directed to three needs:
- Training. Certification and continuing education for volunteer team members — technical rescue, wilderness medicine, navigation, and incident coordination.
- Equipment. The tools missions depend on: rope and rigging systems, communications and GPS units, medical supplies, and gear for desert, mountain, and water operations.
- Operations. Direct support for the county teams that respond, helping ensure readiness is never limited by resources.
Search and rescue is one of the core priorities of the Arizona Sheriffs' Foundation.
How to help
There are three ways to stand behind Arizona's search-and-rescue teams:
- Join Friends of the Sheriffs. Annual membership begins at $25 for individual Community Supporters and supports the Arizona Sheriffs' Foundation.
- Make a one-time gift. Gifts to the Arizona Sheriffs' Foundation support the teams that answer the call, along with the Foundation's other public safety priorities.
- Partner as a business. Supportive Business Partners stand with Arizona's sheriffs year-round and are recognized across the Association's events and communications.
Help Bring Arizonans Home
Your gift to the Arizona Sheriffs' Foundation helps fund search-and-rescue training, equipment, and operations across Arizona — ensuring help is ready when the next call comes.