Arizona Party Bike to Donate all Winterhaven Profits to Community Food Bank

Tucson’s Winterhaven Festival helped launch Arizona Party Bike, now the company is giving back to the community in need.  

The 73rd annual Winterhaven Festival of Lights starts Dec. 10 and runs through Dec. 26.

Arizona Party Bike has been running Winterhaven tours since 2014, when the neighborhood’s board member Jeff DeConcini saw an article about the new party bike company in the Arizona Daily Star and approached owner Robert Mayer about bringing the concept to Winterhaven.

“As a local startup owner, I was ecstatic, and lucky, to have the opportunity to participate in Winterhaven,” said Mayer. “It was a huge break for my business.”

“As a new concept, the party bike took quite a bit longer to gain traction than I thought it would,” he said. “Winterhaven ended up being half my revenue for my first year in business, which allowed me to get out of the hole and start expanding.”

Eight years later and party bikes at Winterhaven have become a yearly tradition for many Tucsonans. The company has expanded from one party bike in 2014 to 30 bikes across multiple cities and states.

“Winterhaven now makes up a small amount of our revenue company-wide, but will always have a special place to me,” Mayer said. “So, I thought to myself, with everything going on in the world, how can our participation in Winterhaven be a unique opportunity to support our community?”

The Winterhaven Festival supports the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona. In 2021, the Tucson community donated $39,437 and 57,612 pounds of food during the Festival of Lights. 

“With rising food prices and homelessness, it made sense to me that Arizona Party Bike could make a huge contribution by turning our Winterhaven tours into a fundraiser for the food bank,” said Mayer, “Arizona Party Bike will donate every dollar of profit it makes from Winterhaven this year to the food bank. Hopefully we can increase what they raise during the festival by $10,000-$15,000.”

“Between Covid shutdowns and now rising prices and the prospect of a recession, many small business owners have had a lot of fear the last two years. I get it. We were shut down for five months straight. But don’t let fear drive your decision-making,” said Mayer. “Pay your people well and give back to your community. There is no better act of optimism than giving it away knowing that tomorrow is another day.”