Homeless Connect, Disconnected

A successful service giving free rides to people experiencing homelessness peters out with lack of funding

BY HANNAH HERNER

Abdulkadir Mohamed once walked from his home country of Somalia to Kenya. The roughly 1,300-mile journey took three months. He walked all these miles at 13 years old, having to leave his mother and father, who had disabilities, at home.

When he moved to Nashville as a refugee at the age of 17 in 1997, he got a weekend job at a car wash, and would have to walk five miles to a bus stop. A co-worker’s family member took mercy on him and ended up giving him a ride home. Navigating public transit in a new country, with limited weekend service and an unfamiliar language, was a struggle.

Fast forward 23 years to the winter of 2020, and Mohamed was in a position to help those who were disconnected from resources in the same way he once was. He put a new idea into action — give people experiencing homelessness and poverty free rides, on demand. He called it Nashville Homeless Connect. From Dec. 15 until March 15, two dedicated handicap-accessible busses ran a loop around town from 7 a.m. to midnight and offered individual rides on demand.

In all, the service gave 20,800 trips in those 90 days. All of the money to produce the pilot program came out of Mohamed’s own pocket. He wanted to prove that it could be done before putting together a board or anything, he said. And it worked. But now the Homeless Connect vans mostly sit vacant.

“I’ve been working in nonprofits since 2000, and I’ve not seen anything like this. It’s incredible. This population is in such need,” said Bobby Daniels, volunteer development director for Nashville Homeless Connect.

Mohamed maintains that in the hierarchy of needs, first is food, second is shelter, and transportation is number three. It seemed to him that transportation was always missing in the equation when it came to getting people experiencing homelessness the chance to get back on their feet. It’s always about the shelter. He heard it all the time when he began reaching out to people who lived on the streets.

“The services already exist. Not just creating a new and different service. There’s a lot of [services] that exist, these people just were not connected at all,” he says.

Transportation is a thread that runs deep in Mohamed’s life. While working at that car wash, Mohamed took some classes to learn English, and got a janitorial job at Nashville schools. For 11 years he worked two jobs — the other managing rental cars at the airport. In 2008, he got laid off from both jobs. He became a taxi driver for a few years, and began to gradually buy more vehicles and rent them to the drivers. Remembering his parents whose disabilities stood in the way of getting where they wanted to go, he created On Demand Paratransit, which provides after hours and out-of-county rides for those who have a physical disability in contract with WeGo.

Mohamed found that when people used Nashville Homeless Connect, it was almost always for necessities. The average length of travel was just eight miles.

Riders met basic needs, like getting groceries or doing laundry. People rode to get their IDs, drivers licenses, to job interviews and medical appointments. This transit even brought people experiencing homelessness to the Neighborhood Health clinics for COVID-19 vaccines, and the service was instrumental in getting people to warming shelters on the coldest nights. What would take multiple days on the city’s public transit, with Nashville Homeless Connect, they could do in one.

“I’m not talking about the luxury life, I’m talking about the basic human life,” Mohamed says. “Especially when you live in the United States, it’s more difficult without transportation.”

And the program saw some grow out of using it. Homeless Connect drivers would take people to their job the first week or so, and then once they got paychecks, they were able to pay for WeGo.

“In the beginning I was thinking maybe we’re going to have some trouble with the community,” Mohamed says. “They’re going to sleep in the van, they’re going to be drunk — we have had zero incidents in the vehicle with the unhoused community. ”

Other homeless service providers loved it. They didn’t hesitate to put their logos on the side of the van — a move requested by Mohammed and his team to help instill trust in the potential riders. But they didn’t give any financial support.

Daniels calls the 90-day pilot ending without any real plan for the future “tragic” because he saw just how much Nashville stakeholders bought into it — something that doesn’t always happen in the Homeless Service Provider community. While there was buy-in in spirit, there wasn’t any financially.

“At the end of the day, one of the things that we've learned with this is that we're probably going to have to have some governmental funding,” he says. “Because this is a community issue. So that's where we are with that. I mean, you'll hear just a little bit of frustration in me because we really needed all those people. I mean, because everybody, all of the stakeholders, totally, totally embraced it. And in doing so, we needed more than them just embracing it. You know, we needed the funding.”

Daniels wrote a grant for MTA that will probably get funded, he says, but they won’t be able to do as much as they did before. They hesitate to start it up again for fear of having to stop again. They’d like to have a years’ worth of costs to get time to get buy-in from stakeholders to build such a service into their budget. Daniels and Mohamed would like to see area organizations work $5,000 or $10,000 into their grants to support this. If a collection of organizations did this, it could live on, and be sustainable.

It’s no million dollar program, Mohamed says. It’s $29,160 per month to pay for bus drivers, dispatchers, insurance, bus maintenance and fuel. The busses are paid off. “But at the end of the day in all the organizations we all talk about it all the time, you know we have some issues with transportations. We are not addressing it together.” Mohamed says. “I say it's doable, but as community they have to come together, find the resources to keep doing, to continue.”

www.nashvillehomelessconnect.org/about-us/