Provo • Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen — 50, with gray hair, tattoos and a big heart — calls herself a “grandma,” and the people experiencing homelessness she helps are “her people.”
On a sunny Friday in May, under a pavilion at Provo’s Maeser Park — across the railroad tracks from Utah County’s hub for homelessness services, the volunteer-run Food & Care Coalition — she finds one of them, Brandon Jackson, 29, who has “significant heart issues,” Shiffler-Olsen said. He’s sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a blue T-shirt with the sleeves cut out, with his puppy tied to a pillar.
Brian Mecham, 56, sits at a nearby picnic table, with his thin, plastic-rimmed glasses, and a Harley-Davidson do-rag — and in need of a new pair of boots. There’s Randy Snyder, in a fluorescent green T-shirt. Further down the table are Angelica “Raven” Peterson and Kate “Baby Girl” Hauck, both in athletic wear, taking turns talking on the phone and wrangling one of their two talkative dogs.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Advocate Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen, back, listens as Brian Mecham, right, and Brandon Jackson, speak about living on the streets at Maeser Park in Provo on Friday, May 30, 2025.
“I’ve got first aid and clothing in the car if anyone needs to go through it,” Shiffler-Olsen tells them, “but, I think you guys are already covered, right?”
They were. Except for the boots. “Still looking,” she tells Mecham. “It’ll happen. Next week. Trust me.”
By 2 p.m. that afternoon, the temperature had been steadily rising; around 6 p.m., it would reach a high of 90 degrees. Shiffler-Olsen had already distributed water and dog food to the group. Often, Shiffler-Olsen said, she will bring electrolyte powder to help keep her people hydrated.
At the end of April, the county’s winter warming shelters closed for the season, leaving this scrappy congregation and others like them with fewer options for shelter this summer, when people can fall victim to the other end of extreme weather conditions.
“When are they doing cooling centers?” Peterson asked.
“They’re not,” Shiffler-Olsen said.
“Why?” Peterson asked, incredulous. “It’s already so hot, and it’s going to get hotter.”
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Randy Snyder pushes Brandon Jackson, both experiencing homelessness, back to a covered picnic table after visiting the public restroom at Maeser Park in Provo on Friday, May 30, 2025.
While state law requires cities and counties provide warming shelters in the winter, there’s no such law mandating shelters that provide relief from the heat.
Utah County is the second-largest county in the state — and rapidly amassing new people faster than crews can build homes for them, state data shows. There are also now more homeless people looking for services in the county without a drop-in shelter, said Brent Crane, the director of the Food & Care Coalition, the county’s first-response homelessness agency.
The annual federally mandated Point-in-Time Count, a tally of how many people are sleeping on the streets or in shelters on a single night in January, showed a decrease in people from 2023 into 2024. But Crane said that data is flawed — a snapshot of a few nights, not the entire picture.
The most recent point-in-time count tallied just 175, according to the state’s homelessness dashboard. The county counted 675 people who used the warming centers over the winter season.
That influx is hard on everyone involved — especially those struggling to get by without a home in a town with strict local laws against public camping.
“This freaking town, they deny me the right to protect myself from the elements. They won’t let me put a tarp over my head when it’s snowing, when it’s raining. … They will not let me rest during the day or at night. This is the worst town I’ve ever been in,” Mecham said, “and I’ve been across the country.”
Provo city officials declined to answer The Salt Lake Tribune’s list of questions about its homeless response, deferring to Utah County.
Utah County also did not answer The Tribune’s specific questions about its plans to provide resources and services to the county’s homeless population. The county would not address whether that population is growing, nor would it discuss how its plans and policies align with Provo’s.
Instead, a spokesperson provided a statement that said it is “proud of the compassionate and coordinated care we provided last winter — an unprecedented effort in the state that included our first-ever nightly Warming Centers.”
“Our community of service providers, volunteers, and stakeholders came together to meet critical needs with empathy and dedication,” the statement continued.
The statement also said the county is “proud of its strong history of supporting a robust network of service providers who help those in need.”
Challenges of more people
About 20% of the 675 people who accessed resources in Utah County this winter, the county said, were from outside of the county — like the majority of the people under that pavilion with Shiffler-Olsen in May.
He said the increase meant the center was handing out 20% more meals this winter than the year before. It’s like expecting 10 guests at your home and greeting 100, he said.
“What burdens would this place on your family if you had to cook meals, provide showers and toilet facilities, provide bedding, etc? What if they were disrespectful and didn’t follow your ‘house’ rules?” he said. “What if they decided to loiter in your neighbor’s yard, engaging in prostitution, drugs and other illicit activities?”
Not everyone does this, Crane clarified, but some do. He said he’s established ground rules to reduce the chaos, and providers are doing their best to provide services to the influx of people.
Compounding the issue, Shiffler-Olsen said, is that some people are becoming increasingly stressed trying to survive in a county they say doesn’t want them there.
Shiffler-Olsen said she spent every other week in March and April trying to eat, sleep and carry out daily activities like people experiencing homelessness do. She called it, imprecisely, “street week,” and it’s how she met more of “her people.”
Months later, Shiffler-Olsen said she was still reeling from the experience.
She said she was heckled waiting for a bus to get to the warming centers. At other times, she said she felt invisible pulling her cart and belongings through town and watching doors held open for others shut in her face.
“What hurts me is that the [Latter-day Saint] community in Provo has lost touch with its own roots,” Shiffler-Olsen said. “We’ve forgotten that the Mormon pioneers were homeless, that when they pulled hand carts, it wasn’t that much different than pulling a cart through the streets of Provo.”
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Angelica Peterson, right, meets with advocate Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen at Maeser Park in Provo on Friday, May 30, 2025.
That alienation builds, she said, and many turn to drugs to numb that pain or to make it through the nights. Some who turn to substance abuse don’t make it.
According to Provo police, at least three unhoused people died this winter, each from overdoses. Two died in a warming center, while the third died in a motel room for which they were given a voucher.
After one woman died in a county building, Shiffler-Olsen sought out a sleeping mat near where she died. It was “morbid,” Shiffler-Olsen said, but she did it “so that I could see the room from her perspective.”
What did she find there? Shiffler-Olsen paused for a moment, before deciding on one word: “Hopelessness.”
“Yeah,” she continued, “there isn’t much hope.”
The county’s plans for the coming winter are due to the state by Aug. 1. Utah County officials declined to say whether they were considering a permanent shelter, one of the options in the state mandated winter homelessness response plan, like Davis and Weber counties have considered, or if they would return to the warming centers and emergency shelter model this season.
Meanwhile, Salt Lake County officials are still planning a 1,200 bed congregate shelter somewhere in the county.
“That work continues as we carefully review feedback from last year’s efforts and develop plans for the upcoming winter,” the Utah County statement read. The county added that officials are still evaluating the “challenges we faced and identifying ways to improve.”
“We’re welcoming input from individuals with lived experience of homelessness, service providers, public safety personnel, faith leaders, state officials, and local government representatives,” the statement said. “We remain committed to thoughtful collaboration.”
Crane said he would prefer one location this winter, instead of returning to multiple sites, which included busing people nearly 30 miles a week from location to location. He also wants more beds, and a place where people can “be during the day so as to avoid the loitering and other issues that currently plague the population.”
Shiffler-Olsen said she has heard rumors of increased security at sites and was concerned that too much could turn people away.
Some people will choose to stay away regardless. Like Peterson, who rode out winter nights from her truck, sometimes at the warming centers, but not inside them.
“Temps were freezing. I don’t like crowds,” she said. “So I wouldn’t sleep in the warming centers, but I would park there. It was the only [place] I could actually sleep.”
She said now that the centers are closed, she can’t park there and has to find new spots.
During her weeks on the street, Shiffler-Olsen said she found solace at the library. She could go there to get out of the weather, use its electrical outlets to charge her devices, or access the internet from its computers or wifi. And no one bothers you if you stay for hours.
She still often goes there to check on people, including that Friday in May. After more than an hour beneath the pavilion, Shiffler-Olsen tells her people it’s time for her to go.
She wants to find Joshua Norris, a 19-year-old from Iowa who had ingratiated himself with Peterson and others after coming to Provo a few months earlier to live with his boyfriend. He ended up homeless — for the first time — when the boyfriend’s parents kicked him out and called the police.
Shiffler-Olsen says the story reminds her of her own, when she became homeless at 18. Now Norris, Shiffler-Olsen says, calls her his “street mama.” Peterson calls her that, too.
“We are a family, though, aren’t we?” Shiffler-Olsen asked, shortly before leaving for the library, about a mile-and-a-half away.
“It is more of a family,” Hauck said, “than I’ve ever had my entire life.”
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Joshua Norris meets with advocate Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen, not pictured, at Provo City Library at Academy Square in Provo on Friday, May 30, 2025.
Not a ‘good place to be if you’re homeless’
Within minutes of arriving at the library, Shiffler-Olsen finds Norris.
Norris says he and his boyfriend eventually broke up. His last few months in Provo have been a crash course in homelessness, an “exciting adventure,” he said.
He got through it, he said, with the people he met, like Peterson, who let him stay in her vehicle when he needed to, and her husband, who recently arrested after getting into a fight outside the Food & Care Coalition. And Shiffler-Olsen, whom he met when she was volunteering at the warming center.
On this Friday, he takes drags from a cigarette and lounges on the green grass beneath a shade outside the library. Norris pulls at the lawn, every so often extracting a withered sprig, dropping it and searching for another. He says he had had enough of Provo. He hopes this adventure is about to end.
“This ain’t really a good place to be if you’re homeless, in my opinion,” he said, adding, “and I’m pretty sure most people can agree with me as well.”
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Josh Norris, left, meets with advocate Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen at Provo City Library at Academy Square in Provo on Friday, May 30, 2025.
Norris said he was frustrated with local police, who “bug us constantly.”
“Like they will not leave us alone,” Norris said, adding that he has seen police arrest homeless people “just because they had nowhere else to be.”
“Well, it is code,” Shiffler-Olsen responded.
“I mean, it is code, yes, but if they wanted to keep homeless off the streets,” Norris said, “they might as well just keep the warming center open 24/7.”
In addition to his troubles with police, Norris says he also faced homophobia and violence in Utah. He said sometimes the provided meals he received had already spoiled. He recently was suspended from the Food & Care Coalition for loitering, too — “until dinner tomorrow.”
“But I don’t care,” he said. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
His exit, a Greyhound bus headed east, is so close. He lays out his mental checklist. First, he needs to get his stuff from “camp.” Then, he will take the next train north to Salt Lake Central station, where he will sleep overnight.
His bus was set to leave at 7:50 Saturday morning. Next stop: Kansas.
“I already know,” Norris said, “it’s going to be a way better situation.”
Correction • Oct. 21, 2025, 1:50 p.m.: This story has been updated to reflect Utah County’s most recent warming center usage data.