COVER STORY

LESSONS FROM A COLD WINTER

‘Contributor’ Director Cathy Jennings serves as chair of the CoC Shelter Committee and on the Metro Covid Emergency Task Force. These are her lessons from a cold winter.

BY CATHY JENNINGS

On Nov. 22, a predicted 27-degree low temperature activated this year’s opening night of the Metro Emergency Overflow Shelter. A group of us, including the vice mayor, a couple of nonprofit directors, and a formerly homeless woman, were at Music City Central on Charlotte Avenue directing folks experiencing homelessness to the 23B bus, which would take them to the Metro Shelter.

Funded with ARP funds, the free ride was part of the new “Hub and Spoke” transportation plan put together by the Metro Covid Emergency Task Force, of which we are members, and WeGo Public Transit. The wind was bitter cold. Outreach workers around the city alerted those who would be exposed to deadly temperatures, transporting them to the ‘hub’ on Charlotte, or ‘spokes’ of various locations around the city, where Mobility Solutions’ vans provided the first leg of the journey towards food and warmth.

The location of the shelter was also new. The old elementary school on Brick Church Pike was originally scouted as the replacement for the COVID Shelter at Nashville Fairgrounds, which had returned to its original purpose, but it was an ideal winter shelter. The choice was also more trauma-informed than the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office facility used in 2019-2020, which homeless advocates and the Continuum of Care Shelter Committee requested that the city reconsider using. Meetings with the surrounding community were held and, within a few weeks, Metro Social Services transformed the building with cots, supplies and portable showers.

The Metro Shelter is one shelter in Nashville’s Cold Weather Response Plan, implemented from Nov. 1 to March 31, providing people who experience homelessness the best possible information and assistance to seek shelter indoors. It is a low barrier program, inclusive of people with pets or on the registry, and is a collaboration of efforts: The Nashville Rescue Mission shelters the majority of Nashville’s homeless, providing meals and beds for over 600 men, women and children; Room In The Inn partners with local congregations and shelters 150-200 men in the winter; Launch Pad shelters LGBTQ young adults, and Metro’s Emergency Overflow Shelter, which is triggered to open at 28 degrees and serve as an overflow to community shelters, has capacity for 200.

This has been a cold year. With six weeks to go as of this writing, the Metro Emergency Shelter has already been open 32 nights, compared to the total of 27 nights last year and 19 nights the year before. It also has been a busy year, with numbers pushing 1,000 to 1,200 total community beds per night occupied, compared to 700-900 beds last year. Indeed, the shelters were so busy that on five different nights, the Metro facility reached capacity and The Salvation Army, an emergency contractor for Metro, opened an “overflow” shelter, providing meals and beds for up to 150 people each night. Whether this is because the new transportation/outreach plan is bringing more people into shelter, the facility is more trauma-informed and attractive, or there are more people experiencing homelessness, we won’t fully understand until the PIT results are released. (The PIT, or point-in-time, count is a count of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness that HUD requires each CoC nationwide to conduct in the last 10 days of January each year.)

The 28-degree trigger for emergency shelter activation has always been a source of frustration for many advocates, and I can say that since becoming chair of the Shelter Committee three years ago, I find myself even briefly outside in cold weather thinking about those who live outside — 35 degrees is cold and 30 is very, very cold. I know three people who died outside this year and I am certain there are more. The CoC Shelter Committee, and subsequently the Homelessness Planning Council, passed a recommendation to Metro to open the shelter at 32 degrees. Most cities of our size and in our region have shelter systems that activate at 32 degrees or higher.

The Shelter Committee also recommended, and Metro Social Services received ARP funding, to expand Metro Shelter operation days to extreme weather unrelated to the 28-degree trigger, like flooding or severe storm warnings. Last year, rising water killed three people experiencing homelessness at their camp. This year, on Feb. 24, flooded camps and continued rain and flood watches prompted the opening of Metro Shelter. Within six hours, 75 people found shelter at the Brick Church facility. Progress.

Providing shelter is not outside of a housing-first philosophy — it keeps people alive until housing is found. Shelter should lessen the number of days lived outside. It should not be an either/or proposition, but a continuum. Surely the solution to homelessness is housing, and more specifically permanent supportive housing with an array of accessible services.

However, shelter is the first step on the path to housing, bringing people back into the community, giving hope through connecting them to resources like food stamps, an ID, or health care, and initiating housing navigation through entry into the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) and Coordinate Entry (CE).

To that end, the Task Force recruited and trained four flex-team outreach workers to work within the Metro Homeless Impact Division system, providing services to homeless individuals with COVID, connecting shelter clients to resources, and entering them into HMIS and CE.

As I continue to work with the shelter system this year, I see many successes to celebrate: a transportation system that is working, a good facility found and hopefully made permanent, HMIS intake during shelter, an outreach community that is amazing, and a shelter system that communicates, solves problems and reacts quickly. Operating a shelter is not easy; clients are often experiencing mental and/or physical trauma and are distrusting of the system. Issues arise, late night phone calls are made, and I am continually grateful for the common ground that Metro, WeGo, and the nonprofit providers have found to come up with solutions.

However, as I talk to individuals grateful for a meal and a place to lay their head for the night, I can’t help but reflect on the effort involved by both the served and the providers. I imagine myself in the night, leaving all I own in the world only to hope it will be there when I get back, getting into a van, which drives me to a bus station, where I wait for a bus to take me to a shelter, that I leave before 7 a.m. the next morning in the cold and begin the journey back. It would feel like the first step on a path to nowhere instead of housing.

I think about shelter providers and the emotional weight of witnessing the same suffering day after day. Or Metro Social Service and Salvation Army employees, working nights at the shelter after putting in a full day in their office. Or outreach workers, advocating on behalf of their unhoused friends and frustrated at the perceived lack of empathy they see them receiving.

How does a city as prosperous as Nashville have 2,000 individuals sleeping in shelters or places not meant for human habitation? Fingers are often pointed, but perhaps we aren’t asking the right questions. The words of the recently deceased, Dr. Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health, ring in my ears: “The idea that some lives are less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”

I believe that, surely, we can do better.

Perhaps we need to listen more: What is it that people need to reclaim their dignity and reunite with their community? Ask them, and more importantly, listen to them. We need to experiment more and not be afraid to make mistakes and learn from them: Does a metro/nonprofit system with smaller, geographically located shelters improve shelter quality and housing outcomes? Would contracting out shelter operations to nonprofits with trained outreach workers improve shelter atmosphere and housing outcomes? We need to educate ourselves more: How do we foster autonomy in those that we work with? How do we inspire hope? Above all, we need to cooperate, work together, and quit pointing fingers, remembering the humanity of all of our neighbors, both the unhoused and the housed.

And finally, we really need to build housing in Nashville! Lots of it. Permanent supportive housing, which is different from workforce housing. Shelter should be temporary, and it should reduce the number of days someone lives outside. That can only be so when housing is readily available.

If you have ideas, I’m open to learning more lessons if you are.

Email me at cathy@thecontributor.org.