The Quest for Affordable Housing

Message from Our President and Board Chair

It’s not difficult for us to picture steady growth here at The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee.

Since its groundbreaking in May 2021, our new building has been going up — ever so slowly but surely — at the corner of Woodmont and Belmont boulevards in Green Hills.

The Foundation has long outgrown its friendly confines at 3833 Cleghorn Avenue, which was a generous gift years ago from the Maddox Foundation. As our staff spends its last days, weeks and months here, a pesky pandemic continues to linger. Like so many organizations, our work has been on staggered schedules between office and home.

Regardless of where that important work takes place, our hearts, minds and souls have remained dedicated to helping make Nashville and Middle Tennessee a better place by connecting generosity with need.

The stories and photos in these pages of our Annual Report — among them the work to ease the acute shortage of affordable housing in the region, the increased planning by key area nonprofit organizations for the inevitable next natural disaster, or establishing a new Award Fund in Dickson County — reflect the hard work and dedication of a community backed by generous donors who are strategic in their giving.

It’s also worth spending time in these pages perusing the capsule descriptions of many of our almost 1,500-plus charitable funds. From Art to Zoology, they’re the bedrock of Middle Tennessee’s planned giving.

More than 30 years ago, The Community Foundation set out to make giving comfortable, convenient, and cost-effective, and we’ve worked to promote and facilitate giving with confidence. We continue to help people help others by customizing philanthropy to fit our donors’ intentions.

That is our mission … all of it.

Ellen Lehman Decosta Jenkins

President, CFMT Board Chair, The Community Foundation 2020- 2022 of Middle Tennessee

As photographed at a mixed-use property in Nashville’s The Gulch known as Owens Place after the founder of The Housing Fund, Loretta Owens, major figures in the push for affordable housing in the Nashville area include: (from left) Brian Tibbs, a partner at the architectural firm Moody Nolan, Inc. in Nashville and chair of the Metro Nashville Historic Zoning Commission; Marshall Crawford, President and CEO of The Housing Fund; attorney Michelle Gaskin Brown, Manager of Public Policy for Amazon in Nashville; and David Thibodeau, retired banker, philanthropist and a founder of The Housing Fund.