NEWS
Nashville’s unsheltered population will not be counted this year BY HANNAH HERNER Nashville will not have a count of people sleeping outside in 2021. The city’s Continuum of Care Homeless Planning Council was granted an exception for this count, which is typically required by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The unsheltered count normally takes place during one night in January, where more than 100 volunteers canvas the city to count those sleeping outside. If these folks are awake, volunteers administer a survey; if they’re asleep, volunteers merely count them. In a typical year, the city is required to submit this unsheltered count, along with the Housing Inventory Count of how many shelter beds are empty on a given night and a count of those staying in shelters. The latter two will still be submitted this year. Nashville joins cities including Austin, Denver, and Los Angeles, in canceling the unsheltered count for 2021.
Up through December 2020, the PIT count committee of the Nashville Continuum of Care Homeless Planning Council had planned to conduct the unsheltered count with new protocols in place, including a shorter survey and skipping the in-person volunteer training. The exception request written by Suzie Tolmie, homeless coordinator for Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency, cited the following as the reasons for canceling the count: “Tennessee faces highest positive rates in US; the increase in illnesses already observed locally — and anticipated — after the holiday; the reported ICU bed availability in Middle Tennessee as of Jan. 6 was only 4 percent; and the spectre of a (second) variant of COVID that is more contagious.” Tolmie says she doesn’t yet know the effect this could have on the amount of funding that Nashville receives from HUD.
She added that HUD also looks for shrinking numbers of people who are homeless for the first time and shortening the time spent homeless when deciding funding awards. “Just because you have more homeless folks, it doesn’t always mean that you’re going to get more funding,” she says. “What HUD is looking for more and more is to see those numbers sort of begin to dwindle, and effective addressing of the homeless problem out there.” The exception request also promised to bolster outreach to encampments, especially to get more people entered into the Homeless Management Information System, a database that tracks homeless services and who they’re going to in Nashville. “Those of us who are for the data collection being centralized in the homeless management information system kind of dream for the day that we really will
not have to do an outdoor unsheltered count or sheltered count, for that matter,” Tolmie says. “We will all be in one place. Technically, we’ve got some work before that something like that happens” The unsheltered PIT count has historically been considered undercounted, but without it, 2021 will be an anomaly amongst other years. A Facebook post on the matter by Open Table Nashville, a homeless outreach organization reads: “While we absolutely support the decision to cancel the outdoor portion of the year’s PointIn-Time count as a COVID-19 precaution, we know it means so many people will be left uncounted. We worry about what that will mean in regards to funding based on the PIT count data — especially during a year when more people are choosing not to stay in congregant shelter settings.”
NASHVILLE HISTORY CORNER
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON AND GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER BY RIDLEY WILLS II Two of the greatest Alabamians of the years between the Civil War and World War II are buried side by side, not in Birmingham, Mobile, Montgomery or Huntsville, but in the country town of Tuskegee at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. They were Booker T. Washington, founder at age 25 of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, and its leading developer, and his compatriot at the school, George Washington Carver. Both lived their adult lives in a segregated society in one of the poorest states in the Union where, between 1890 and 1915, Jim Crow laws discriminated violently against former slaves and their descendants. Booker T. Washington, a brilliant rhetorician, was the leading voice of his race. He advocated getting along with white people and not confronting them, a controversial position. In the fall of 1896, Washington hired a brilliant graduate of Simpson College in Missouri, to come to Tuskegee to take over a newly organized Agricultural Department. This man was George Washinton Carver, whose profound knowledge of botany, ag-
Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver riculture and soil economy enabled him to devise ways of helping the economically submerged South to better ways of living. Not content with mere scientific discovery for its own sake, he was passionately
convinced that the results of research must be brought directly into the lives of the people. To this end, he travelled through the South in a wagon filled with scientific exhibits of all kinds and with examples
February 3-17, 2021 | The Contributor | NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE | PAGE 5
of aids to further better the lives of poor Americans, particularly Black people. On those weekend trips, he customarily met with Black farmers living way in the sticks. He urged them to quit relying on cotton as their cash crop and instead grow peanuts and sweet potatoes. He showed their wives how to pickle, can and preserve vegetables and fruits. More than one Black Alabama farmer said Professor Carver, “knows more than God does.” President Theodore Roosevelt knew and enormously respected both Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. Both men visited Roosevelt at the White House and Roosevelt visited Tuskegee Institute. Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace was also an enormous supporter of both Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. At age 86, I probably will never see Tuskegee. I wish I had when I was younger and I urge you to do so. Should you go, you will also learn about the Tuskegee airmen, who proved in Italy in World War II that some Black men were expert flyers.
