NEWS

How Open Table Nashville is showing college students and businesspeople the reality of homelessness

BY JUSTIN WAGNER

“You don’t want to listen with a sad heart. You don’t want to listen with a sympathetic heart. You just want to listen,” Alex Smith said to a group of college students and Nashville newcomers. “The privileged seem to forget that everybody needs someone to talk to.”

He was advising the crowd on how they can extend kindness to those experiencing homelessness. Having experienced homelessness himself, Smith knows cheap talk from genuine altruism.

The key, he said, is empathy.

And he was able to share this knowledge, in collaboration with nonprofit Open Table Nashville, in front of several dozen Belmont University students.

“I was just more or less providing living experience,” Smith said. “It was new to me because I didn’t know how they would kind of respond to what I was saying, but I realized that it’s easy to talk to the youth about homelessness because their mind hasn’t been tampered with yet.”

He provided that experience at one of Open Table’s urban immersions, the most recent of which he co-facilitated with Lindsey Krinks, Open Table’s co-founder and director of education, at the Nashville Public Library.

At the immersion, college students reviewed how city ordinances adversely affect homeless populations, what gentrification does to the housing market and how city streets are policed to continually displace the unhoused.

The immersions are tailored to the audience — which range from businesspeople to grade school students — and are put together by the leadership at Open Table.

Chase Cate, Open Table’s resource coordinator, has helped organize two of these immersions so far and said they help people notice the oft-overlooked homeless population.

“I have never had a job that I’ve loved more,” Cate said.

Privilege often goes hand-in-hand with non-proximity to the homeless, Cate explained. Open Table’s urban immersions make an attempt to bridge the gap in education and awareness by showing people firsthand why solutions are necessary and sharing real stories of affected communities with them.

Smith echoed that sentiment, saying the immersion was an opportunity for him to assist Open Table after they had helped him through mental health challenges and financial issues alike.

He also added that college students are a prime target for the message due to their willingness to learn and lack of established prejudice.

“They are truly concerned,” Smith said. “They can literally see one of their family members actually becoming homeless … so it’s a little closer to home for them.”

Seeing genuine concern and care for these issues from the current generation was uplifting, even if solutions to homelessness are often out of reach.

“I absolutely loved it.”