Lived experience cohort says they’ll no longer meet without compensation from Metro
“Our pause is not a retreat,” Kennetha Patterson wrote to Nashville’s Office of Homeless Services Director April Calvin on Jan. 15. “It is a boundary rooted in integrity.”
Patterson, the self-titled “homeless CEO” and leader of Metro’s lived experience cohort, announced that she and her fellow advocates would stop participating in Nashville’s Continuum of Care — the federally-mandated body coordinating homelessness services. Metro refuses to pay her, or anyone else, for consulting as experts with lived experience of homelessness.
Her countermove came three weeks later. On Feb. 2, Patterson submitted a letter of intent for Synergy Cooperative, her organization, to facilitate the 2027-2030 strategic planning process. In the corporate world, this expertise—user research, service design feedback, quality assurance—commands high consulting fees and full-time salaries. Patterson’s bid forces Metro to decide: pay for that knowledge, or let people who’ve never navigated coordinated entry design the system alone.
April Burns Norris, another lived experience advocate, described the frustration of contributing while in poverty: “Everybody else … they get paychecks. We get nothing, but we really do have the solutions.”
OHS, backed by Metro Legal, has maintained that compensating advocates who are on committees of the Homelessness Planning Council (HPC) would violate procurement rules. The Metro Human Relations Commission, which has sought relief for Patterson, said in October that a workaround was “probably months away.” As of press time, “there are no major updates.” OHS and Metro Legal didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Patterson and others aren’t asking to be paid as board members — they’re asking to be paid as consultants. Under a previous structure, MDHA compensated advocates as vendors through HUD planning grant funds. “No one has ever requested payment as board members,” Patterson wrote. “The issue is the required compensation for Lived Expertise participation in planning, governance, and system design.”
The HPC’s governmental status shifts depending on what’s convenient. When advocates pressed the HPC to exercise oversight of OHS, Calvin was explicit: “The HPC is not the oversight board for the Office of Homeless Services, since our office reports directly to the mayor.” Metro wants it both ways: governmental enough to justify not paying community experts, but not governmental enough to wield power over Metro policies or funding.
There’s reason to believe the real cause is less legalistic — rooted in curbing people like Patterson from influencing policy. Nashville’s homelessness strategy is shaped by property owners who’ve never experienced homelessness and developers who profit from housing people, without anyone tracking how often those tenants end up evicted from subsidized units.
The perverse incentives of designing a dysfunctional homelessness are glaring. Eviction is a multimillion-dollar local industry: in 2025, attorneys represented landlords in over 9,000 Davidson County filings, generating an estimated $4 to $5 million in legal fees. Money flows freely through the system — just not to people like Patterson.
And there’s precedent for Metro undercutting equity to serve power.
Beginning in the Biden administration, Nashville began dismantling equity infrastructure. The Arts Commission’s Thrive program had paid individual artists for community-based projects without issue — until funding shifted toward smaller community organizations. The decision to halt payments came from Finance Director Kevin Crumbo, who had served as Board Chair and Treasurer of the Nashville Symphony immediately before joining Metro. His wife sat on the board of Cheekwood. Both institutions saw their budgets shrink under the equity-focused model.
At roughly the same time, the Health Department dissolved its Bureau of Health Equity and refused to pay community safety grant recipients, claiming there were no valid contracts (there were). In each case, Metro found obstacles for community-centered initiatives that never materialized for established players.
But, as many note, when Metro wants money to flow, it flows. The Nashville Downtown Partnership has collected more than $40 million in special assessment funds since 2004 without a single legally required budget authorization from Metro Council. Metro Finance sent $500,000 to Strobel House and hundreds of thousands more to private property owners — without contracts. The obstacles only materialize for people like Patterson.
Patterson’s letter of intent is a test. The city can pay for the same user expertise that corporations consider essential. Or it can confirm that the system was never designed to serve the people navigating it — just the powerful interests deciding where they’re allowed to be.
“We remain fully committed to our mission,” Patterson wrote, “and we will gladly return once the Collaborative Applicant chooses to engage with us as true and equitable partners. Until then we REST from unpaid labor.”
Mike Lacy is a local independent writer, investigator and advocate working at the intersections of the most and least powerful in Nashville.