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Cover Story
In 15 Years Time
Reflecting on the first issue of 'The Contributor'
BY LAURA BIRDSALL
As The Contributor approaches its 15th anniversary, its co-editors, Linda Bailey and Amanda Haggard, recently dug up the paper's very first issue, released on a cold December morning in 2007. Poring over these early pages feels like time travel. Since The Contributor's inception, we've lived through four different presidencies, a two-year pandemic, a flood, a tornado, a Christmas day bombing just blocks from the paper's office and the seemingly unstoppable tide of development and displacement in Nashville. One wonders how any institution could weather these 15 years, let alone a small nonprofit street paper.
There is a charm to the first issue, an underdog endeavor peppered with its writers' now archaic-feeling Comcast and BellSouth email addresses, and whose design indulges in a slightly overexcited array of fonts. However, one also notices instantly that this first issue is not a capricious or myopic undertaking. Its writers and editors are clearly aware of the vast scope of the systemic obstacles and challenges they face. In what is perhaps the most prescient piece, Charles Stroebel, religious leader and founding director of Room In The Inn, writes passionately about the global problem of homelessness. He is resolute in his conviction that compassion alone is not enough — one must insist, he says, that housing is a human right and that we must fight to enact this principle. Although Housing is a Human Right has now become a familiar refrain, this notion was a radical one at the time.
Tom Wills, the paper's co-founder (whom one may still find tapping away on his laptop in The Contributor office, a small annex of Nashville's Downtown Presbyterian Church), writes an evocative profile of unhoused artist Paul Fahle. Fahle, then a staple at Bongo Java on Belmont, is a subject of genuine aesthetic admiration for Wills (an artist himself), who is thrilled to discover a cache of Fahle's paintings in storage. He recounts the experience of reuniting Fahle with his work before losing track of him again.
Profiles of other members of the homeless community fill out the issue, describing folks' daily lives and struggles. One piece recounts the planned renovation for the park across from Nashville's Downtown Library. The park is a gathering place for the homeless community and folks wonder if the changes pitched as improvements will in fact exclude them from a treasured public space. Another piece explains why fresh socks are one of the most crucial items for an unhoused person to own. In another feature, a homeless fellow named Tony responds to an interview question with one single stream-of-consciousness response that veers from Sisyphus to Camus to T.S. Eliot in a way that somewhat marvelously makes its own perfect sense.
The first issue's breakout star is indisputably Ray Ponce de Leon (Vendor #0001), a homeless vendor and writer who was to become a beloved staple in The Contributor's pages. His wit and jouissance sparkle in a satirical piece proposing that the Bush administration introduce a program whereby members of the public can adopt homeless people as pets. The piece is goofy and dark, but it belies a more important ethos, that on which The Contributor was founded: that our homeless neighbors are not a monolithic bunch, suffering abjectly and awaiting charity (or adoption through Habitat for Humane-ity, as Ray describes his ironic proposal). Rather, we live in a community in which some folks are housed and some folks are unhoused. Both groups comprise artists and writers and gardeners and animal lovers and parents and kids. In his sharp and imaginative way, Ray gently reminds the reader that "helping the homeless" is not akin to saving the whales or adopting a dog. We (those who are housed right now) help our unhoused neighbors because they are our neighbors and friends — we would be the abject and sorry lot if we didn't.
Today, the paper trucks along, weathering storm after storm. Its tight-knit community of vendors, staff and volunteers have come together time and time again to overcome sometimes farcically difficult odds and to welcome new folks into the fold. The paper itself has found its rhythm and tone (and its fonts), but it has never lost its scrappy optimism or its exuberance, even as it continues to address the tough realities of homelessness. Housing, it still steadfastly contends, is an undeniable human right.
Ray Ponce de Leon passed away in 2017 and is dearly missed.
Reflecting on visibility and endurance
BY TASHA A.F. LEMLEY, CO-FOUNDER, FORMER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
I made my first visit to Brookmeade Park yesterday. Working on a small update piece for WPLN, I went with a former longtime resident who warned me before going in. “They're in fear of what other people will think,” she said, “they've lost hope of…their life changing. And it's all hidden now. Hidden down there.”
There’s less than 50 people living in this half-mile stretch of the park right now — down from more than double that at pandemic peak. It’s surreal. Genuinely apocalyptic. There’s a large tent at the trailhead under a trail map for visitors who no longer come. Then hundreds of shopping carts line the greenway where our Nashville-park-standard wooden bridges and paved paths weave through. All in disrepair.
It’s muddy. And the grass is an awkward length. Residents are quiet. A few people bike through, but not for exercise. They’re headed to their home in the woods. Something happened here. “It's not a home, it's not a park,” my interview tells me, “it's survival mode.”
I think back to my first visit to Tent City on the other side of town nearly 20 years ago. That particular evolution of that campsite felt … different. Like it had a sense of purpose. And life. We cooked fish and made hand pies under the interstate while pets and chickens roamed around. There was music. And laughter. Maybe it was the mercy of younger naive eyes, or always being at arms length. Or maybe we really are in a different time.
Whatever it is, Nashville is different since we founded this rag 15 years ago. For one thing, I think our unhoused friends have gotten more visible. Maybe it’s thanks in part to the endurance and pride of our newspaper vendors. “Here I am. See me.” Or maybe it’s the same reason deer come down my urban street more often now. We’re growing into the city we’ve been trying to be — and that growth simply can’t include everyone.
The campsite closure cycle seems increasingly swift. It was just months, if not weeks, after the camp behind Gerst Haus was razed (as was the Haus itself) before some of the same residents returned home and raised tents again. And there they are, for all the rest of us to see. Like a beacon of despair, and resilience — and a flashlight on our liability. The voice of a prophet calling in the wilderness.
Seems like, used to be, it was easier to look the other way. We had to actually go behind… and under — and through — and down to get to someone’s tent. But now things seem more honest, maybe. Mary is right there under the I24 overpass. The tent Thomas lives in is by the tracks as I walk to my coffee shop. John and Kenyon’s camp occasionally peppers the bowl as we circle down Ellington, and on the sidewalk behind the Church Street post office live Theodore and Theresa and Samuel and others.
There’s no doubt our fentanyl situation is awful. The economy is tough. Housing is hard to get at. We’re all tired and angry and scared. And mental health services are difficult to navigate. And homelessness is a tidal wave on the West Coast. At the same time, I hold hope that something has a better chance of healing when it’s no longer festering in the dark. Tiny Tim wanted people to see him because “it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”
Pleasant? But what about healing for him? That took a reforming benefactor, yeah? So, hooray for visibility! Cheers to discomfort! May I stop hiding — and never forget someone else’s load as I’m contemplating my own.
Reflections on limited views of justice
BY DAVID DARK, AUTHOR, EARLY WRITER FOR THE CONTRIBUTOR
My email address has changed, but I still want to say a word — many words — about Harmon Wray. I’m still learning from him and trying to get in on his act which, at every turn and every minute in particular, was a witness of transformative justice.
I say was, but I should probably say is. Harmon’s witness still rings loud and true even as the terrors he sought to address and overcome with love have intensified and become even more normalized in Tennessee. Not long after my piece on Wray was published in the first issue of The Contributor, I started teaching at the Tennessee Prison for Women through the Life Program run through David Lipscomb University. One night, we received a visit from Gov. Bill Lee who was there, I assumed, to express an interest in solidarity with incarcerated people. Little did I realize he would stage a successful run for the governor’s office, refuse to meet with men on death row who asked him to pray with them before killing them, and also decline to follow President Joe Biden’s directive to release nonviolent offenders charged with cannabis possession. If I’d known what we were in for — how limited Lee’s vision of justice, civility and valor is — I hope I would have said something.
I know Harmon would have. He loved people, but he had no respect for positions. He wrote me a letter of recommendation when I applied for graduate school at Vanderbilt. When I got in, he was happy for me, but he wouldn’t credit Vandy (or any institution) with the esteem he extended to individuals. “You’ll be good for their brand,” he said. That posture toward what the Apostle Paul refers to as principalities and powers had helped me think through my own work more carefully. An institution, at its best, might function as a legacy and, in some sense, a gift. But it something only operates as an acquisitive and abusive dynasty and therefore exerts its power as a grift. Harmon was a cleareyed counselor in these matters.
In my piece, I refer to “the prison system,” and, in a preceding paragraph, “incarcerated people.” I now mean to exercise more direct language. Anthony Ray Hinton has taught me that our system isn’t broken. In fact, it does exactly what it was designed to do. Our for-profit, industrial military incarceration complex is an extension of the transatlantic slave trade. When we see it this way, we can begin to realize that it must be defunded and abolished. When I speak of individuals as “incarcerated,” Rahim Buford reminds me that the word I’m looking for is “caged.”
In honor of Harmon, let me put it country simple: My state cages people for profit. Under Gov. Bill Lee this is all undertaken with our money and our presumed consent under the spell, the wicked dream, of retaliatory justice. I can imagine Harmon telling me we shouldn’t expect anything different from a man who refuses to debate his challenger or his predecessors (Bill Haslam and Phil Bredesen) who won’t publicly affirm that he should.
Harmon had a way speaking plainly of the chumocracy that makes our state government a white supremacist stronghold and the cults that comprise out culture of deferential fear and moral cowardice. But for all the fecklessness and fear. He also understood that love overcomes fear and that transformative justice seeks the healing of all parties. Harmon goes before us.
Reflecting on walking together
BY TOM WILLS, CO-FOUNDER, DIRECTOR OF VENDING
The Contributor was founded 15 years ago to help meet the needs of homeless men and women then and into the years to come. The years to come are here: today and tomorrow. I invite you to walk with us, by buying the paper, reading it and telling your friends to do the same.
The first issue of 2023 will be The Contributor’s 400th issue. And over the past 15 years, around 4,000 homeless and formerly homeless vendors have sold over 7.3 million papers and profited more than $20 million. We celebrate this, but we also step into today and look forward to our next 15 years as a true Nashville solution to homelessness.
The majority of our vendors who have been active for longer than six months have found housing because of the hard work of our vendors and staff. But it is also because people like you bought and took a paper home.By taking a paper home with you, you have helped a homeless vendor sell out, and selling out is the powerful moment that can change a vendor’s life. It makes a vendor want to keep being a vendor. And vendors that come back to replace their papers find value in themselves. It means more than the dollars they profit. It is hope.
When this paper started 15 years ago, Nashville was slowly beginning to change into the city it is now. The gritty, partly abandoned downtown landscape had attracted new residents for the first time in memory. The Sobro neighborhood and Gulch were mostly empty warehouses. But Nashville’s first modern downtown apartment building The Cumberland was nine years old. The new Downton Library had been there just six years. And more new residents were finding loft apartments and claiming downtown as their neighborhood.
But our homeless neighbors had been there for decades. The Nashville Rescue Mission opened at 429 McGavock Street in 1954. In 1985, Charles Strobel founded the Room In The Inn to house people across the city in the winter months. A lesser known part of that story is that Stroebel also began to network with downtown churches to feed homeless men and women lunch throughout the week. The Downtown Presbyterian Church was one of those congregations that in the late 1980s chose Wednesday to serve free meals to those in need.
It was at The Downtown Presbyterian Church in 2007 where Tasha Lemley asked two homeless outreach workers (Will Connelly and Steve Samara) and I if we wanted to start a street paper. This was a different kind of question, than asking “How do we provide a meal?”
Street papers ask: “How do we provide homeless persons self-sufficiency and a voice in their community?”
We gathered at meetings at The Downtown Library with an assortment of folks. When searching for a name, I suggested we call it “The Contributor” because it could carry a double meaning. Not only would it be a way for the people of Nashville to “contribute” to help our homeless vendors, but it was a way for our vendors to be and see themselves as “contributors to society”. And on Nov. 14, 2007, we published our first issue.
Since then, 4,000 men and women have trained to start their own businesses. They have spread out over the greater Nashville area and over a decade and a half. Your support will encourage them and those that train next year to invest in themselves. Over the past 15 years, well-meaning folks have told me that they tell the vendors to keep the paper and sell it to someone else. While generous, this gesture actually discourages vendors from seeing themselves as business owners. When I suggest they take the paper instead and send them back to us to buy more, they light up, they “get it.”
Nashville is a growing city and our homeless population is unfortunately growing along with it. Help us be a path of hope by taking a paper home with you when you see a vendor selling it. Tell your friends to do the same. Get to know a vendor by name. They are your neighbor. You can help change their life and possibly yours.
Reflecting on the paper as a front door
BY CATHY JENNINGS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE CONTRIBUTOR
I came to The Contributor through Curtis. He sold the paper on 8th and Wedgewood, and I ignored him for about as long as I could until he caught my eye one day and I caved and rolled down the window. It took a few more days until I actually read the paper, and a few more papers until I walked down to The Contributor to volunteer. Multiply those days by a few thousand and here I am, working daily for this magical nonprofit.
For there is something magical about seeing people turn the corner and begin to succeed in their communities. People often walk through our doors hopeless, sick, and desperate. The depths of homelessness are hard and climbing out alone almost impossible. But the people who work here, volunteer here, and are vendors here, recognize the dignity that we all are born with. We focus on that dignity and offer a path. It takes hard work, consistency, and patience to succeed as a vendor, but Contributor vendors are a plucky lot. My life has been greatly enriched because they are a part of it.
Well-meaning people sometimes tell me that we need to “change our model,” that newsprint is “dead,” and that our vendors should sell “something else.” But our model and the paper attached to it are so much more than a product to sell. Yes, it is absolutely an immediate income for someone who needs it. But it is also a beacon of hope, a mechanism for dignity, a path to housing and a voice to the community.
I would never have known about Fort Negley and the shortage of housing if Curtis had sold me a bottle of water instead of a paper. I would never have come to love Jaime and her cats, or Keith and his gardens, or a hundred other neighbors had I not read about them in The Contributor. Nor would I have read the wisdom of Jen, Norma, Maurice, Vicky and countless other vendors who write and draw for The Contributor.
In the last 15 years, we have gone from a paper sold on the bench in front of Downtown Presbyterian Church, to a state recognized, low-barrier workforce opportunity, with wrap-around services that include food, housing, SOAR and mental health and addictions services.
But the front door of The Contributor should always be the street paper, should always be our vendors, their struggles, their victories, and their indomitable spirit. Their stories in the paper is the vehicle that goes over, around, and through the walls that divide us.
That work and the paper are funded in part by our annual fundraising campaign with NewsMatch, which allows us to triple match donations in November and December.
Please help keep this work alive by giving during these months at thecontributor.org/ donate.
When you buy the paper, you change a vendor’s life. But more importantly, when you read the paper, you change your life. Thank you for reading and being part of the Contributor family — 15 years in, we are grateful you are still reading
Reflecting on Vendor Expression
BY LINDA BAILEY, CO-EDITOR, THE CONTRIBUTOR
I read a poem today that was written on a crumpled paper bag. Since I started working at The Contributor in 2011, I've seen submissions written on the back of napkins, medical paperwork, coffee bags and scraps of notebook paper.
Whenever I meet someone who hasn't yet read The Contributor, I tell them to start with the Vendor Writing. In my experience, the heart of the paper lives here.
It was in these pages (and through conversations with vendors) I learned about the power of writing or drawing your story and having a place like The Contributor to publish them.
Vendors write a lot about their faith, they write about tough times and good times, they share recipes and gardening advice, they talk about their animals and going through the housing process. I've laughed, cried, gasped and cackled at vendor submissions. I've immediately called a friend to read them a submission they'd enjoy. The subject matter is as diverse as the vendor force, which really shouldn't be that surprising.
This week, I took a scroll down memory lane through 15 years of PDFs looking for a few old submissions that would perfectly highlight vendor expression throughout the years. Turns out this task was impossible so I just ended up choosing a few of my favorites.
I hope you enjoy them. I hope you learn something from them. I hope you keep reading vendor writing. And I hope you call a friend and tell them to Read The Contributor.
