A Few Questions With

Q&A with Mike Hodge

BY JUDITH TACKETT

Mike Hodge is known as one of the foremost community organizers in Nashville with decades of experience working for and helping start different community efforts and organizations.

As a young neighborhood organizer with the United Methodist Church, he learned the ropes of organizing. In the mid 1990s, he helped start Tying Nashville Together (TNT), which was a non-denominational citizens coalition of mainly religious institutions. Hodge also worked for 17 years with the Neighborhood Resource Center, which is now rebranded as Neighbor 2 Neighbor, before his move to help launch Nashville Organized for Action and Hope, better known as NOAH.

Now in his third year of retirement, he is still an active volunteer within the community and his impact on grassroots efforts are felt citywide.

What got you started in community organizing?

I grew up in Savannah, Ga., which is a nice town, but when I was growing up, it was very segregated. I wound up getting a job while I was in undergraduate school at an aging white congregation in downtown Savannah. It was in an area that had really deteriorated because of white flight and because of disinvestment. The neighborhood desperately needed help, and I was a part-time youth director at the church. So, I tried to get the church involved in the neighborhood – you know, like getting some of the African American kids who were in the neighborhood to participate in the programs with the white kids that I already had. And the church just didn't want to do that. That just really made me angry at the church. But it also made me ask some questions about, “What do you do in a neighborhood like this that desperately needs some kind of help?”

I wound up coming here to Scarritt College — it’s now called the Scarritt Bennett Center — and got a master’s degree in Church and Community Ministry. That's when I met Rev. Bill Barnes, who was pastor at Edgehill as well as being a professor at Scarritt. He's the one who started telling me about community organizing, I had never heard of that before.

When I got my degree in Church and Community Ministry, I was able to get a job as a church and community worker and started learning about neighborhood organizing. I did that in several neighborhoods here. One that's now Wedgewood-Houston. At that time, it was pretty low income. It was not the trendy neighborhood that it is now. I worked over there, and I worked in Woodbine, I worked in Edgehill, and a number of different neighborhoods trying to help residents come together, identify the problems they solve and then build the power to make change [happen].

Why did you move from the Neighborhood Resource Center to get involved with NOAH?

I moved [to NOAH] for a couple of reasons. One is, like many nonprofits, the Neighborhood Resource Center was having funding problems. There had been a major funder that was no longer able to continue funding them after almost 17 years. So, all the staff, we all laid ourselves off. I kept working for free for a while. That was one reason.

But the other reason was that throughout that work that I had been doing as a neighborhood organizer, I was really fascinated by [the question of] how I could do something larger. How could I do something beyond one neighborhood, do something citywide? Because there are so many neighborhood problems that you can't fix on a neighborhood level. It's going to take citywide power to fix some of these neighborhood problems.

I had heard of congregation-based organizing. At first, I didn't understand it. Eventually though, I realized that nationally, community organizers were taking the church much more seriously than the church took itself. Because there were organized people, there was organized money, and there were some values in congregations. And you know, that's something that you can help people pull together around.

There continues to be a call to get more faithbased organizations involved in addressing homelessness and affordable housing. When you hear that call, what do you think?

Well, I think two things. Number one, I think that’s a great idea. Number two, I think the people that are saying that usually want the people and the money of congregations to be applied to direct service. Which is good. There's nothing wrong with that.

But the people who are saying, ‘Let’s get congregations involved,’ they usually don’t want them to ask policy questions. And for me, [while] congregations need to be about direct service [because they are] in proximity to the problem and understand issues more, they also need to be about changing structures.

I guess the third thing I’m thinking is that I would love to see more congregations really welcoming and engaging people that are receiving services, so that they're not just receiving services, but they are becoming active workers on their own issues.

When I think about that, I think about Paul Slentz. He was the pastor at 61st Avenue United and his congregation was pretty much all either unhoused people, people who had been unhoused, or people who were on the edge of being unhoused.

What is different about NOAH?

There are a number of people in NOAH that were very active in TNT (Tying Nashville Together). I was initially, but I was not there when TNT ended. So, I don’t know a lot about that. My impression is that the national network that they were a part of did not really offer them the support they needed.

NOAH is a part of a slightly different network. It’s called Gamaliel, and they, to me, have proved to be a really good network that supports the local organization and also helps you look at national issues. I've been really impressed with them. So, that’s the main difference I can think of. The groups are very similar.

What are some of the achievements you would like to highlight for people who don’t know what NOAH does or is?

Editor’s Note: Hodge is not speaking on behalf of NOAH as he is retired.

I think one of the biggest achievements was listening to people. NOAH did listening campaigns in the congregations and groups that were part of it. There were hundreds and hundreds of one-on-one conversations that were held to talk to people about what they cared about. These conversations were to build relationships with people. [And through those conversations, core issues bubbled up] about what the key things are that hurt people and their family. What are the things that they worried over that woke them up at three in the morning?

Those listening campaigns really brought up not just the issues, but also the people that wanted to take action on those [issues]. So, I think one major achievement has been listening to people because nobody listens to normal folks anymore.

The second thing is that once that listening had taken place, NOAH was able to pull together the key issues and present them to decision makers and then hold decision makers accountable.

That was done initially in candidate meetings. At the first meeting we had, we had maybe 1,500 people there. We had eight candidates for mayor, and this was in 2015. We presented our issues to these eight candidates for mayor. And then they each got a minute to talk. The key question for all of those candidates was, “If you're elected, will you work with NOAH on our issues and meet with us every quarter?”

So, I think the first thing was listening to people. The second thing is identifying the issues and presenting them to decision makers and holding those decision makers accountable.

And then, the third thing really is pursuing those issues beyond those candidate meetings. It was not just, “Oh yeah, we're having an election, let’s have meetings with candidates.” It was really pursuing those things. NOAH has been meeting quarterly with all of the mayors committed to that. Sometimes that’s a meeting of 15 people, sometimes it’s 700 people. It kind of depends, but it’s talking about those issues.

Now, if we want to talk about more concrete achievements, one of them was calling for a moral budget that really focuses on services and needs that people have. It's so easy to get lost in city budgets and just dollars and cents and all of that. But if we're really talking about what has an impact on people's lives, we can talk about a moral budget.

One of the things we've been pushing for over 10 years was money for affordable housing. We've been able to get the city to dedicate well over $130 million to the Barnes Affordable Housing Trust Fund. We also were able to get affordable housing advocates appointed to the MDHA Board. And we helped get the city to create a [Division of Housing]. Before that [the issues of affordable housing] always depended on what the mayor wanted to do, and now that we have an actual [Division of Housing], there is a structure, so that emphasis should continue. It doesn’t depend just on the mayor.

We also were able to get special centers created in all the public schools to deal with suspensions and that kind of thing, so that instead of just suspending kids, we're trying to figure out what's going on with them. Why are they causing trouble? We were trying to break the school to prison pipeline with that.

[NOAH] also supported the formation of the Community Oversight Board, and now we've been trying to support the folks that are doing the Community Review Board in that structure. And we supported the transit campaign. Those are some of the big ones.

What are your hopes for next-generation leaders in community organizing, especially for NOAH and Neighbor 2 Neighbor?

I have a couple of hopes. One is that, as you mentioned, there will be a next generation of younger people [leading that work]. I’m 72 and a lot of folks in our congregations are aging. All of us are realizing that we have to really understand what young adults and other ages are caring about. My hope is that there will be more young adult leaders that are acting on the things that are important to them and their peers.

The second thing is that we can somehow balance the interests of some of the neighborhoods that are so concerned about preserving their neighborhoods with the need for affordable housing for the entire city.

There have been real reasons that so many neighborhoods have rebelled against developments because developments have been done so badly. And so, [neighborhoods] have become very protective and that's good on the one hand, but how do we find that balance between what’s good for your immediate neighborhood and what’s good for the whole city?

One of my favorite scriptures, Jeremiah 29:7, has God saying, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” That’s what I believe about our neighborhoods because I think when the whole city, when all of us are prospering, that’s when our individual neighborhoods will prosper as well.

Right now, I’m very concerned about people just getting pushed out of Nashville, and Nashville becoming a place where no one of normal income can live. I want to see everyone of all income levels, all races, all ethnic groups … I want to see us all valued and valuing one another.