A Few Questions With

A Few Questions With the Metro Action Commission

BY JUDITH TACKETT

The Contributor talked with the Metro Action Commission’s Lisa McCrady and Marvin Cox as part of a series called "A Few Questions With" where we interview Metro agencies about their department’s most pressing issues.

McCrady serves as the Director of Communications and Cox is the Director of Family and Community Services at the Metro Action Commission. (Answers are from McCrady.)

How would you describe the Metro Action Commission to a newcomer in no more than five sentences?

I would start with our vision statement and that is, Davidson County is a place where people reach their highest potential creating a legacy of physical, emotional, social and economic well-being from one generation to the next.

That gives us the framework for how we engage with individuals. We learned very quickly that referring to ourselves as an organization that helps people in poverty felt very isolating to some because some residents don’t believe that they are in poverty. So, we looked at what we are really trying to get at, which is to equal the playing field. What’s most visible [in our work] is the social and economic mobility of our population.

What is your overall budget and where is the funding coming from?

During the height of COVID, our budget was over $100 million, which is the most our organization had ever administered. That was due in large part because of the funding we received from the U.S. Department of the Treasury for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program. That was about $75 million given to the city of Nashville to help individuals remain housed. Close to 8,000 families were able to remain housed in our city. This program also impacted the city and landlords, who were also [affected] by COVID.

Without those COVID funds, our budget is around $28-30 million. Probably about 90 percent of the funding we have comes from state and local grants. We also receive funding from the city to administer our programs. To clarify, state grants are generally federal dollars that come through the Tennessee Department of Human Services (DHS) and through the Tennessee Housing Development Agency (THDA). But our Head Start Program and the money we received from the U.S. Department of the Treasury are direct allocations from the federal government. Programs such as our rental assistance, mortgage assistance and utility assistance, those are pass-through grants from DHS and THDA. And then there are funds that come in through the city directly to us for residents who may not qualify for the programs that we fund with other grants but still have demonstrated that they experience a hardship.

What are your top three strategic priorities right now?

The top priorities would be workforce and education, [which we divide into] early education and youth.

For the workforce piece, we partner with adults who benefit from upscaling based on high-yield employment opportunities in an expedited way. For instance, sometimes having a degree is not as important as having a certain certification such as in IT, health care, and childcare. Those are things an adult can go through in 8-12 weeks of a classroom experience, receive a certification, and immediately go into a high-earning job or a career. We have been very successful in all of them, but probably the most impactful we have done is in information technology. We’ve been able to help adults receive that foundational certification, which immediately equates to a position making $50,000 to $70,000. That’s one of the [certifications] where we can see the immediacy of what rescaling will do. Also, as adults go into retraining, they are not paid and we are able to provide stipends and internships, which is a way for adults to meet their families’ needs as they’re going through these programs. So, all of our workforce programs look at opportunities to help adults in that area.

With early education, that’s our early Head Start program. The way that Head Start is designed is very comprehensive. It’s more than the preschool experience for the child. It’s also our best demonstration of what whole-family and [two-generation] work is in our organization. As we’re working with the child, we’re also partnering with the adults in their lives. And so, while the child is away learning, we’re able to engage with the parents to look at what else is out there for them, and how they can strengthen their social and economic levels.

The last category is our youth, which is specific to our POWER Youth Program. Within that program is our STEAM camp that is specifically for older siblings of Head Start children. So, we potentially work with teenagers whose smaller sibling is in Head Start and their parents are engaged with us to work on their upward mobility. The STEAM campaign came out of a communitywide effort that started with a Youth Symposium quite some time ago. Young people were having a really tough time. They were victims of crimes and youth said there were no meaningful activities for them and no ways for them to make an income. We were part of that movement and [eventually] that’s how the STEAM campaign came to be.

We then expanded the POWER Youth Program, which was the youth program given to us when the NCAC (Nashville Career and Advancement Center) was no longer in existence. We were able to build upon the foundation and the format that we had for young people and expand it. The name POWER Youth came from young people. They didn’t see themselves as what was previously known as Opportunity Youth and then Opportunity Now. They wanted something that spoke to who they are. And so, POWER is the acronym for Providing Opportunities for Wealth-building and Economic Resilience for youth and young adults.

What are two highlights of your work for this current fiscal year that you are most proud of (knowing that you do much more than just those two things)?

Our POWER Youth Program is incredible. This summer we’ll have 1,009 positions for young people to be involved in. We have opportunities for youth as young as 14 up to 19, and then there are opportunities for young people 20 to 25 as well. The first day of youth workplace experiences and internships for the younger people will start Monday, June 5, with a huge summit — the POWER Summit.

All the young people will come together for their first day at the Municipal Auditorium. Our goal is for 1,000 youth to be engaged in a lot of activities. The different work experiences or internships will be at nonprofit organizations, local businesses, Metro city departments. The younger people, 14 to 15, will have work experiences with projects such as learning how to run sound engineering in the studio or writing music, being scientists, working on murals, working with recycling programs, and those type of things. The older teenagers, 16-19, will have more of an internship experience where they’ll work Monday through Thursday. Then on Friday, they’ll meet with their specific coaches where they have roundtable [discussions] where they talk about how their week went, about anything they may struggle with, or they don’t understand or don’t like very well. In addition, the coaches are out during the week going to the different workplace experiences and making sure everything is going smoothly.

The second thing to highlight would be the return of our summer food program to the way it was pre-COVID. When we were going through COVID, we had to be very creative in how we distributed food in the community. These are the summer meals that we provide when school closes. We are very passionate about that program because we know that for some young people when school closes, food availability becomes very scarce, sporadic, uncertain and sometimes not as nutritious as it needs to be. During the height of COVID we were in various locations throughout the city and set up in parking lots in apartment complexes because we couldn’t go into community centers at that point.

Now that COVID [restrictions] have gone away, we’re able to resume and engage our sites at community centers and make sure we have as many meal sites available in our community as possible. We also partner with apartment complexes because sometimes children are not located near a community center, and so the apartment complexes have opened up their property to either host a site or for us to bring mobile diners to them.

Is there any new program or new approach that MAC is embarking on that you would like to mention?

I would like to talk more about our approach to workforce development. We want to make sure that we engage both residents and employers [to figure out] how we can engage those who have yet to return back to employment. What are the challenges? We know that childcare is one of the challenges because of the impact of COVID on childcare where some of them had to close. We also know that people still have preferences for working from home. We also know that some of the certifications and organizations that used to engage residents in job finding or job preparation, they’re now coming out of the virtual and remote environment.

Also, it’s worth highlighting the impact the funding through the Treasury Department had and the amount of housing support we were able to provide through COVID. It really highlighted a problem that we already knew we had, which was the availability and affordability of housing here in Nashville. Making sure that people are able to cover the cost of just living is still a challenge..