After one year of unnecessary fighting and a power struggle between Metro Nashville and people with lived expertise/experience, the Continuum of Care general membership body voted on Feb. 19, 2026, to move the Consumer Advisory Board and the Youth Advisory Board from the Homelessness Planning Council, thereby making members with lived expertise/experience eligible for compensation under Metro’s legal interpretation.
“Engaging people with lived experience in any project or policy work must be based on time, trust, equal partnership roles … and fair compensation, of course.”
This quote stems from a blog written by Kaara Kallen and posted on dashconnect.org in June 2024. It is how she began her story about the importance of compensating people with lived experience.
In her blog, Kallen quotes the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which stressed the importance of including people with lived experience and expertise across all decision-making aspects is essential in its COVID-19 homeless response. HUD also said that “it is vitally important that [people with lived experience] are appropriately compensated for contributing their time, energy and valuable expertise.”
In Nashville, however, a quiet but fierce fight has been brewing over the Office of Homeless Services’ (OHS) refusal to truly advocate for and find a solution to compensate people with lived expertise/experience who serve actively on the Continuum of Care (CoC), a community-based local planning body that coordinates housing and services funding for individuals, families, and unaccompanied youth experiencing homelessness.
In a nutshell, OHS has been hiding behind Metro Legal to avoid paying people serving on the Lived Expertise Cohort (also known as the Consumer Advisory Board), even though the members of that cohort are not the final decision-makers. Rather, they make recommendations to the Homelessness Planning Council, a community board that serves as the governing body of the CoC.
What is more, while the HPC is sitting within Metro government, it does not oversee a department or has any decision-making or recommendation power over any aspect of the Metro budget. This is critical and is the main reason why I keep referring to it as a community board while the OHS and the Mayor’s Office keep blurring that line whenever it is politically convenient.
Last year, OHS, whose director reports directly to Mayor Freddie O’Connell, released a statement in which it defended its decision not to compensate people with lived expertise/experience.
“Under Metro law, administrative bodies, including their committees, operate as voluntary entities, meaning members are not compensated for their service. This structure aligns with Metro’s governance practices, which apply consistently across the more than 70 boards and commissions, many of which include committees. Exceptions to this structure, such as the Board of Equalization, are based on state law mandates, which require compensation for that specific body. However, there is no state or federal law requiring compensation for the Homelessness Planning Council or its committees, including the Consumer Advisory Board.”
Granted, paying people with lived expertise/experience, can be complicated. But the OHS statement misses the point. As outlined in an article by Mike Lacy published in The Contributor’s Feb. 11 issue, the Lived Expertise Cohort isn’t “asking to be paid as board members — they’re asking to be paid as consultants.” Previously, when the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA) served as the CoC lead entity, the group was paid as vendors with federal CoC planning dollars.
When that leadership changed from MDHA to Metro, the payments dried up. Kennetha Patterson (read the Q&A here), who chairs the Lived Expertise Cohort, has been fighting for one year for fair compensation for people with lived expertise/experience serving on improving our local community system.
Earlier, I called this a quiet but fierce fight because — as seems to be a trend with OHS – Metro elevates the voices of people with lived expertise/experience only when they stick with the political talking points seamlessly aligned with OHS. But when it comes to receiving criticism, the messengers are shut up quickly through official memos, public statements, and by hiding behind Metro Legal.
Having worked in Metro government for over 10 years myself, I know that Metro lawyers are more than willing and capable to help find and implement solutions. But such an approach would require sincere advocacy on OHS’ part on behalf of the people who are the experts on how our local homeless system actually works.
It is interesting to observe that Metro seems to be able to hire homelessness consultants in a manner that would have flouted procurement processes when I was still at Metro. We actually fly national experts in for local symposiums at a hefty cost. Or, in another example, Metro paid a total of $750,000 over the course of two years for a consulting contract out of New Orleans ($250,000 of that contract was never approved by Metro Council because Metro broke it up to keep it under that $250,000 threshold requirement for Council approval).
In comparison, the Lived Expertise is asking for less than $30,000 a year to compensate up to 14 members at a rate of $20 per hour for each individual. This is below the listed living wage for Nashville, which is estimated at about $26 per hour according to Metro’s own Community Needs Evaluation.
Why is it that OHS can hire consultants but cannot find a way to advocate for the Lived Expertise Cohort within Metro and work with Metro Legal to pay them for their time when they serve on CoC committees that do not have decision-making power over how Metro dollars are spent?
The following argument from OHS’s 2025 document seems like a cop-out, “Over the past eight months, Metro has actively explored creative solutions to address concerns regarding compensation for individuals with lived experience.
“This work included questions about compensation that were asked of and answered by a representative of HUD, consultations with technical assistance providers, and a thorough review of potential options. Despite these efforts, no state or federal law preempts Metro’s requirements or permits compensation for these roles within the existing legal framework. For this reason, the CoC Planning Grant will no longer be used to compensate those with lived experience of homelessness effective on February 24, which is the date of the grant fund transfer.”
This tells me that:
For the past year, our city has refused to compensate people who have experienced homelessness, have gone through our local system, and have brought leadership and ideas to the table to work without compensation; and
OHS has potentially spent money on consultants (for a time, OHS hired at least one HUD Technical Assistance (TA) provider after the federal government stopped paying for those) who were unable to come up with a solution to compensate people with lived expertise/experience as consultants.
After Thursday’s CoC vote to move the lived experience cohort under a , it will be interesting to see what Metro’s next move is. What is certain is that the federal CoC planning funds of $465,700 that OHS manages are certainly sufficient to cover an estimated $30,000 a year to pay for fair compensation of people with lived expertise/experience.
Judith Tackett is a longtime homelessness expert and advocate for housing-focused, person-centered solutions. Opinions in this column are her own.