“It takes a village to raise a child.”
You may have heard of this African proverb that describes that it takes an entire community, including family, friends, neighbors and teachers, to help a child reach its full potential in adulthood.
Reflect on this a little more and you’ll discover the profoundness of the phrase. In order for a village to raise a child to its full potential, the village itself must be healthy with the diversity and richness of resources available to raise its children.
No wonder then that the saying now often is interpreted as bringing together the entire community for real and lasting change. When that healthy village is missing, we see people — and entire segments of our community — left out.
This also affects how the nonprofit sector works. Established organizations are prone to thrive while others lack the capacity and access to resources. These underfunded nonprofits are often led by the people who want to fill a gap in their underserved neighborhood based on their own experiences growing up and living there. Unsurprisingly, these are often also minority-led, community-based organizations. This reality is often ignored by what some would term the nonprofit industrial complex.
The best way I know how to explain this is by looking at the example of homelessness funding. Nashville receives about $11.4 million in federal homelessness funding through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) Continuum of Care Program. While this involves a consolidated community application, the actual grants are awarded to eight individual nonprofit organizations and two government agencies.
When we look at the eight nonprofits, none of them were led by a person of color when the last round of grants was written and awarded. Then, in 2020, at the beginning of COVID, $10 million in federal one-time funding became available through the Emergency Solutions Grant. I recall there were several minority-led organizations that had not participated traditionally in these federal funding applications. In short, their applications failed due to a lack of capacity to weed through and manage the complexity of the requirements of these federal grants. But we’ll get into that more.
Before we dig in, I want to quickly examine my own role. I am an advocate and advisor in the homelessness field, but I have often been unaware of smaller nonprofit organizations that serve minority communities outside of the larger, known nonprofits in the homelessness field. That has made me complicit and a part of that nonprofit industrial complex — whether I like it or not. And the only way to overcome this is to be willing to reach out and learn.
The Village was the brainchild of Ron Johnson and Dawn Stone. At the time, Johnson served as the director of the Office of Community Safety under Mayor John Cooper, and Stone was the chief impact and diversity officer of the Center for Nonprofit Management, which is meanwhile known as the Center for Nonprofit Excellence.
Johnson and Stone recognized the gap in capacity building that plagued minority-led nonprofits and made it hard for them to compete in the nonprofit field for grants and funding.
To use the words from The Village, “Impact sectors leaders and organizations primarily serving Black residents in our community have historically faced significant resource gaps, including limited access to funding, lack of mentorship opportunities, insufficient upscaling support, and restricted exposure to networks, both social and political. Moreover, the lack of operational structure within these organizations exacerbates their challenges, impeding their capacity to effectively address community needs.”
This phenomenon is not unique to Nashville, as only about 2.9 percent of total philanthropic giving in the United States went to organizations serving communities of color in 2022, even though “communities of color made up 44.3 percent of the U.S. population as of the 2020 Census.” This information stems from the inaugural Communities of Color Index (CCI) that was released in June 2025 by Indian University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
When disasters happen, we see politicians calling for an increased focus on neighborhoods where minorities live, whether Black, Latina, or other communities of color. But when the disaster is over, the funding usually does not go to community-based organizations to proactively strengthen their neighborhoods. Even though these nonprofits have been living and serving their communities for years, and even though their work has been focused on proactively strengthening the fabric of these underserved areas.
“So many of these organizations are some of your frontline community grassroots workers — some are advocates, some are providing those afterschool services and care,” Erika Burnett, the executive director of The Village, said. “Per government regulations around funding, they were marginalized in a very specific way from processes and procedures.”
Burnett further explained that organizations need to be able to pay for expensive audits that sometimes exceed the cost of their entire programs in order to unlock government dollars. She describes exactly what happened in 2020 when minority-owned nonprofits were not able to compete for the federal COVID grants. Having written a few grants myself, I can tell you that such audits are part of the grant application, meaning even if an organization invests in one, there is no guarantee they will get the grant in the end.
All this explains why The Village was formed.
The Village was launched as an intentionally curated incubation space, [that] “provides a supportive environment for Black nonprofit leaders and organizations primarily servicing marginalized communities to upskill and increase capacity, access, and resources.” (Read more about the mission and vision at cfmt.org/thevillage.)
The Village on the Move
The Village started as a program under the Office of Community Safety in the Mayor’s Office. It was then moved over to the Center for Nonprofit Management for a little while before it became a program under the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee.
Now, it is again on the move. This time, The Village, which is still run as a fiscally sponsored initiative under the Community Foundation, is evolving into its own, freestanding nonprofit organization. It has moved its offices in January from the Community Foundation building off Belmont Boulevard to a freestanding house it rents from The House of God Church in North Nashville. It shares the space with two other organizations.
Burnett (read our Q&A on page 6) joined the Community Foundation and became the executive director of The Village based on the suggestion of her friend, Renata Soto. If the name sounds familiar, Soto is the founder of Conexión Américas, after which she moved on to launch Mosaic Changemaker, an organization focused on “uplifting, growing, and connecting changemakers of color diving community transformation.”
Burnett recalled that she was finishing her time as a mosaic changemaker (class of 2023) when Soto approached her. “She asked if I would be interested in having a conversation with Hal about this new initiative that was being incubated at the Community Foundation.”
With “Hal,” Burnett referred to Hal Cato, who had become the CEO of The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee in 2022. Cato said in an interview with The Contributor, ”I think the role of a community foundation … is to make a community more of a community.”
He continued explaining that the Community Foundation needed to be “much more of a community leader where we step humbly into spaces where we can start weaving together providers, especially those who are newer and have ideas that are overlooked because they are not in one of the big powerful organizations.”
Burnett recalled that this was a time when new CEOs were in transition across Nashville, most notably at the Chamber of Commerce, United Way of Greater Nashville, the Community Foundation and the Mayor’s Office.
“We had a new mayor who received a significant amount of support from The Village during his campaign in addition to multiple newly elected members of our City Council,” Burnett said, adding that she saw an opportunity to exercise her expertise and leverage her relationships to deepen the impact the organizations of The Village had in a meaningful way.
The members of The Village are “also the organizations that in my eyes are having the most impact, especially with the populations that continue to be sort of pushed aside as the city grows and develops,” Burnett said.
The Village is intentionally made up of organizations that primarily serve Black members of the Nashville community. “Those who are most marginalized and individuals who are impact sector professionals who themselves need additional support,” Burnett explained.
To recap quickly, The Village is here to create an environment for leaders who often have lived expertise and their organizations that are at the grassroots level frontlines in our underserved neighborhoods.
The Village has left an impressive footprint. Achievements in 2025 alone include measuring a 92-percent increase in leadership confidence among their participants and being able to help with $179,850 in external member programming investment. In 2025, The Village:
- Served 459 nonprofit leaders;
- Hosted 69 programs;
- Reached 1,200 individuals weekly;
- Formed eight new collaborations;
- Strengthened 20 existing partnerships; and
- Engaged 415 organizations across 11 sectors.
While much work is left to do, The Village demonstrated how a focused approach can help strengthen systems that have and still are largely ignoring marginalized communities.
It will take time to get where we need to be as a Nashville where everyone is welcome to stay and thrive. And let’s remember the proverb we started with: It takes a village.