Dear Contributors,
Over twenty years ago, I found a man dead in an alley off of 3rd Avenue South in downtown Nashville. I did not know his name then, but I remember everything else. I remember the light, the weather, and the many sounds of downtown. I remember sitting next to him waiting for the police to come. They were never able to identify him, and he was later buried in our city’s “pauper’s cemetery.”
Three years later, we started The Contributor. In the first issue, I wrote an article called “Too Hard Living.” It was about him, and about all the people who survive on the edge of our shared city. People who are trying to live, not die, in public.
That was 2007. Back then, homelessness was already a public health crisis, but we didn’t have the language for it yet. Today, we do. We see it in the data, in the tents, in the waiting lists, and in the quiet exhaustion of the people we serve.
And now, even as the crisis deepens, federal priorities are shifting away from permanent housing - the very thing that ends homelessness. The latest HUD Continuum of Care announcement makes that clear. Our $230,000 housing grant, a grant that keeps people safe, stable, and off the streets, is at risk.
I am not writing this to sound alarm bells. I am writing because this work has always been personal, and because we cannot stop now. We have built a newspaper that provides income and purpose, programs that provide housing and healthcare, and a community that provides hope. All of this exists because people like you believe in it.
Your support has always been the difference between “too hard living” and simply living. I am asking you to stand with us again this year to help us keep people housed, connected, and alive.
Whether you have stood with us since those early days or have only recently joined this work, you are part of the reason The Contributor is still here eighteen years later. As we face new uncertainties, your support matters more than ever.
If you are able, please make a donation in honor of our 18th birthday so we can continue doing what this city has trusted us to do: keep people housed, keep people working, and keep people connected to a community that refuses to give up on them.
With gratitude,
Will Connelly
Co-Founder, Executive Director
