The city of Sacramento continues to answer homelessness with enforcement rather than housing. City crews conduct regular sweeps, which are forced clearings of encampments where people are often given only minutes to gather their belongings before everything left behind is taken or destroyed. These sweeps have accelerated since the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which gave cities the legal green light to ban sleeping outside even when no shelter beds are available. In Sacramento, that has meant people being displaced from shade in triple-digit heat while citations and arrests keep climbing.
In that environment, Sacramento Punks With Lunch (SACPWL) shows up with regular distributions of food, clothing, and critical supplies for unhoused and marginalized neighbors. This is the work the Mutual Aid General Fund exists to support, and this month we are extending $550 in financial solidarity to SACPWL. 
SACPWL is an all-volunteer-led, completely democratic, community-based collective. On weekends, they hold distribution events, setting up tables of meals and supplies alongside racks of clothes, open to all neighbors, housed and unhoused. They offer food, water, camping and survival supplies, menstrual aid, safe sex supplies, and harm reduction supplies such as clean syringes, naloxone, and other tools that keep people who use drugs alive and safer. Volunteers are equipped to offer aid without judgment, with the aim of destigmatizing drug use, poverty, and being unhoused.
They are direct about what they are and what they are not. In their own words: they do not offer charity. All members are decision makers, and the aid they share comes from the same community it returns to. Their goal is permanent systems of support and self-determination, not relationships of dependency. In short: we help us.
The need for this work is far greater than official numbers suggest. Cities measure homelessness through a one-night Point-in-Time count that routinely misses people sleeping in cars, staying temporarily with others, or simply out of view. Sacramento County’s 2026 count, released this May, found 7,458 people experiencing homelessness, up nearly 13 percent from 2024. Even that rising number understates the reality. When a public records request forced the release of the county’s own service data, it showed more than 50,000 people had experienced homelessness in a single year, roughly eight times the official count. Government systems did not prevent this crisis, and in many cases they created it. Groups like SACPWL meet people where they are, with what they need, on their terms.