First and foremost, The Contributor is a newspaper. Selling the paper offers an income to its vendors, which many use to help them get off the streets and into permanent housing. The Contributor is also a nonprofit offering wraparound services and vendor-focused programming, all designed to bring our community together to make homelessness a brief, rare occurrence. We do this by empowering our homeless neighbors to achieve income, dignity, housing and community.
Because not all readers may be aware of these other programs and initiatives, I will list and explain them here. I also want to point out that for the past couple of years, The Contributor has pulled together some of the most consistent independent contractors who sell the paper (vendors) and formed a Vendor Leadership Team to regularly seek vendor input into the operational side of the nonprofit.
The Newspaper
The biweekly newspaper is and will remain the core program of The Contributor. It offers an immediate income stream to people who are looking to move off the streets. Contributor vendors are independent contractors with a history of homelessness who sell the paper on street corners and in legal public spaces in Nashville. They are trained and their paper sales are tracked in a database. As a reader, you can now pay your vendor online (thecontributor.org/pay). Make sure to enter your vendor’s name and vendor number when you pay.
The Contributor is unique in that its vendors are independent contractors. In other words, they meet this nonprofit on an equal footing. Rather than coming up to ask for charity, Contributor vendors enter into a contractual agreement with the paper to create their own microbusinesses.
A little-known fact is that 70 percent of vendors who work with The Contributor for six months move into some form or housing.
Housing
The Contributor implements two government-funded housing programs serving about 80 to 100 people with a history of literal homelessness. To meet the federal chronically homeless definition, people must have experienced homelessness for at least one year (either consecutively or having had at least four episodes in the last three years that add up to one year) and suffer from a disabling condition. Most people are referred through the community’s coordinated entry program managed by the Office of Homeless Services. But The Contributor has negotiated that a few openings can be filled by selecting vendors in need who meet the organization’s own eligibility criteria.
SOAR Program
SOAR stands for SSI/SSDI Outreach, Access and Recovery. The Contributor has created a partnership with two local hospitals, Park Center, and the city to identify people who may be eligible for disability benefits (SSI and SSDI) offered by the Social Security Administration. SOAR coordinators at The Contributor find, organize and help develop medical evidence for each claimant and act as their representative and guide throughout the disability determination process. The Contributor’s SOAR program is the largest program of its kind in Nashville that does not require a person to have a diagnosed mental illness. Referrals are made though the hospitals and select nonprofit partners.
Basic Needs
When vendors come up to us to purchase their papers, volunteers and staff use the opportunity to check in and see whether they need food, water, clothing, hygiene items or anything else that might be on hand. If the needs are more than basic, street newspaper vendors can go to the “Front Desk” and get assistance with solving problems around housing, health care, and other important areas. During those visits, vendors are linked to mainstream services they may qualify for such as food stamps (SNAP), journey passes (WeGo bus tickets), health or mental health care, etc.
Where To Turn In Nashville
The Contributor’s annual resource guide, Where to Turn in Nashville, has become a staple for Middle Tennessee area nonprofit organizations. The Contributor produces an annual print version, which started in collaboration with housing justice nonprofit Open Table Nashville in 2013. In 2026,over 100,000 printed booklets have been distributed. Information is also available online at wttin.org.
Unzine
The Unzine Nashville project connects Contributor vendors with local artists to create zines, which are low-fi, low-cost, and easily distributable DIY print publications. This program is implemented in collaboration with Stagger Press and creates another way to generate income for participating vendors. Visit unzine.org for more information.
Unseen Nashville Street Tour
If you wonder what homelessness feels like, looks like on the ground, and how people move themselves out of the situation, you should sign up for a Contributor vendor-led Unseen Nashville Street Tour. These guided one-mile walking tours offer powerful, first-person stories that reveal the struggles and resilience of unhoused Nashvillians. Unseen Nashville tour guides are open to any of your questions and welcome discussions about solutions to homelessness. Sign up online at thecontributor.org/unseen-nashville-tours or email unseen@thecontributor.org.
Ending Homelessness
People often ask me whether I really believe we can end homelessness.
My response is a resounding, “Yes, we can! But…,” and then I go into an explanation that there are two ways to look at how to end homelessness.
First, there is the individual level. When a person experiencing homelessness stands before us and asks for help, do we say, “Sorry, I don’t believe we can end your homelessness?” No! The Contributor and so many other organizations have already proven that we actually can end homelessness on an individual basis.
We know how it is done: by investing in housing through subsidies and building more supplies; by offering the right individualized support services to address any underlying needs; and by linking people with the income to help pay for their new living situation (in permanent housing).
The Contributor is a great example. Any person who shows up at the Vendor Office in the Downtown Presbyterian Church at 154 Rep. John Lewis Way North, two blocks from the WeGo Central Station, can access income immediately.
Specifically, a person with a history of homelessness who is interested in becoming a vendor is asked to arrive at 10 am on a Wednesday for an interview prior to joining a one hour vendor training at noon. After the training, the new vendor will leave with free papers, a Contributor badge, and a guide to help find a selling spot.
I don’t know of another program in town with a lower barrier to access work and income. Having said that, I learned from listening to vendors that it takes time and tenacity to establish their business as street vendors. But for many, the payoff is a flexible work schedule, independence, housing and finding and building a community to support them.
Furthermore, the newspaper helps establish a resume and when a vendor participates in the bi-weekly news release meetings and/or when the vendor comes to the office to purchase new newspapers, there is an ongoing check-in. Relationships between vendors, volunteers and Contributor staff members are built on equal footing like any other business interaction.Through these relationships, vendors can access other resources – either at The Contributor or through a referral to another service provider, depending on the needs of the person.
When you look at this approach, it becomes easy to see how an individual organization like The Contributor can help end homelessness.
When it comes to the question of whether homelessness will ever end in our city or across the nation, the answer becomes more complex. But my response remains the same, “Yes, I believe we can do it. But….”
Building a safety net at the national, state and local levels that is strong enough to prevent homelessness for the majority of people in the first place is important.
Second, it is a matter of the federal, state and local governments’ willingness to invest in interventions that work, have honest conversations about what is needed to do so, and help coordinate programs within a city, county, or state that form a functioning cross-sector systems approach.
I recently read two relevant (and easy-to-digest) articles on the topic of ending homelessness:
- A housing policy debate by nationally renown researchers including Gregg Colburn, Marybeth Shinn, Smantha Batko, Martha Galvez & Margot Kushel from 2025 entitled “What Would It Take to End Homelessness in the United States;” and
- A Substack article from Iain DeJong called “The Wrong Debate: Why Housing First vs. Treatment First Misses the Point.”
You can Google them and they pop right up.
In any case, both of them talk about what it takes to end homelessness. The fact is that the homelessness system alone will not end homelessness. The researchers I cite above say it the best way, “…this system alone will not end homelessness — just as a high-functioning emergency department won’t end illness and injury. Ultimately, the only durable solution to homelessness is to prevent it from occurring — to reduce the flow of individuals and families who enter homelessness.”
But both articles stress the importance of having an overall systems approach in place.
DeJong puts it this way: “Outcomes are shaped less by the intervention a community selects and more by the conditions of the system expected to deliver it.”
He continues that, “four conditions consistently determine results:
- the availability and affordability of housing
- the capacity and quality of treatment and support services
- the degree to which interventions are implemented with fidelity
- the extent to which individuals and communities have meaningful decision-making power over the services that affect them.
“When these conditions are weak, no intervention performs well. When they are strong, different approaches can succeed. This does not mean frontline work lacks impact; it means that impact is often experienced at the individual level while system level results remain constrained.”
The bottom line of both articles is clear. We need politicians and governments to be willing to invest in long-term solutions. Yet, rather than doing so, our governments shift towards enforcement and making homelessness invisible rather than solving it.
We do have the money to provide housing and the needed stabilizing support services in this country. The current federal administration has just proven that to us by spending billions of dollars on a war abroad that nobody wants. What could we do if we instead invested this money to strengthen our communities’ safety net to prevent homelessness for the working poor through rent assistance, access to health care, access to mental and behavioral health, access to employment and education?
Organizations like The Contributor do their best, but we can do more. And we can start so by understanding why we need a strong local system (read Will Connelly’s piece here).
In short, yes, we can end homelessness at the individual and the systems level — and The Contributor is one of the organizations that is trying to do its part a) by offering direct partnerships with vendors; b) by implementing evidence-based solutions following high fidelity to program standards; c) by actively listening to the people with lived experience and expertise; and c) by creating awareness to further transparent talk about what a functioning Housing Crisis Resolution System in our community should look like and how we get there.
Judith Tackett is a longtime homelessness expert and advocate for housing-focused, person-centered solutions. Opinions in this column are her own.