In Nashville, we know that at least 3,500 – 4,000 people are living without housing at this very moment, many for months at a time. Time without housing is not a passive experience. It is a form of exposure that actively erodes health and shortens lives. Unhoused people die 20 years earlier than housed people, according to a 2024 policy brief from the National Healthcare for the Homeless Council.
If this were any other condition with this kind of mortality and decline, we would call it a public health emergency.
Each day outside carries a cost. Sleep is interrupted and unsafe, chronic illnesses worsen without treatment, and medications are often lost or stolen. The body absorbs heat, cold and stress without relief, and being a victim of violence becomes more likely. Small problems become much bigger. Over time, the damage compounds, and the path back to stability becomes more difficult.
We do not often talk about homelessness this way. Instead, we talk about “the homeless system” as if it already exists. I have spent my career inside that system, as a street outreach worker, an executive director and as someone responsible for running organizations expected to deliver results. In any of these positions, my priorities were focused on providing excellent services aligned with our organization’s mission and the requirements imposed on us by individual funding sources. While I attempted to take a bigger systems approach, and while we collaborated with other providers, the main focus remained on our internal outputs and outcomes.
A healthy homeless system, however, means that all nonprofits, government agencies and funders are working together toward the common goal of ending homelessness. What we currently have in Nashville is something looser: a network of shelters, outreach teams, nonprofits and public agencies doing important work, just not always moving in the same direction with a shared goal. Each organization can be well-run, mission-driven and even effective on its own terms. But that does not automatically add up to a system that reduces homelessness.
That difference is not semantic. It is the difference between effort and impact, between multiple organizations offering different programs and a system that actually works. A real system is not defined by how many programs it funds or how many people it serves. It is defined by whether those efforts are aligned around a single, measurable goal: helping people exit homelessness quickly and permanently.
Right now, Nashville, like many cities, is still somewhere in between. There is real progress to build on, but also clear signs of fragmentation and misalignment. Naming that gap is not a critique of the people doing the work. It is a necessary step toward making the work matter more.
Housing Is the Point
The clearest marker of a functioning system is what it treats as the end goal. If the goal is managing homelessness — keeping people safe, fed and indoors at night — then a collection of programs can do that reasonably well for a time. But if the goal is reducing homelessness, the system has to be built differently with permanent housing as the outcome rather than a distant aspiration.
That shift has practical implications. Every part of the response, from outreach to shelter to case management, has to be designed around a simple question: does this help someone move into housing faster? When that question is not clearly answered, programs drift. Over time, that drift adds up to longer stays in programs, slower exits, and a system that serves people without resolving their homelessness.
A real system disciplines itself to track a small set of outcomes consistently: how many people are entering homelessness, how many are exiting to permanent housing, how long they remain unhoused, and whether they return. Nashville has made progress in tracking several of these measures individually, but the full picture is still incomplete. That gap reflects a system that has not fully agreed on what success looks like.
One System, Not Separate Tracks
For people experiencing homelessness, the system does not show up as a coordinated whole. It shows up as a series of entry points like street outreach encounters, program intakes and referrals from other agencies, each with its own process, timeline and expectations. While these pathways are all intended to help, they can lead to very different outcomes depending on where someone starts.
From the outside, that variety can look like flexibility. From the inside, it feels like repeating your story multiple times, navigating shifting requirements, fearing your “case” will fall through the cracks, and trying to understand what comes next while also meeting their basic needs day to day. The burden of coordination often falls on the person experiencing homelessness rather than on the system itself.
A real system reduces that burden. It connects every entry point to a shared process that quickly identifies needs and routes people to resources that help them on their path to permanent housing. Nashville has a coordinated entry process that meets federal requirements, but implementation remains uneven and capacity is limited. Until those gaps are addressed, access will continue to depend too much on where and how someone enters.
Follow the Results, Not the Intentions
One of the hardest shifts for any community is moving from measuring effort to measuring results. It is easier to count how many people are served than to track how many actually exit homelessness. It is more comfortable to fund familiar programs than to ask whether they are producing the intended outcomes. And it is safer to count how many people are housed than to measure how many remain in permanent housing after two years or more.
At the same time, the incentives built into the system can work against those outcomes. Funding tied to bed occupancy or service volume can encourage stability in programs rather than movement into housing. Providers are often asked to do more with less, while still being evaluated on activity rather than long-term impact. These dynamics are about how the system is structured, not about poor intent.
This is also where nonprofit leadership must be honest about its role. As an executive director, it is possible to run a strong, well-managed organization by meeting contract requirements, maintaining funding and delivering high-quality services, while still falling short of contributing to system-level change. The goal cannot be to operate a well-run nonprofit in isolation. The goal must be to connect that work to a broader strategy that reduces homelessness. Without that connection, even good work can unintentionally reinforce the patterns it is trying to solve.
With over 20 years dedicated to ending homelessness, Will Connelly has remained a street outreach worker at heart, “creating space for the stranger” by connecting relationally and hospitably with people who are homeless to get off the streets as quickly as possible. His career includes a mix of direct service and systems-level work, including policy and planning roles for local and federal governments aimed at improving the performance of homeless and health systems. Formerly the Executive Director of both the Metro Homelessness Commission and the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative, Will also served as the CEO of Park Center, a mental health nonprofit in Nashville. His commitment to community and change continues as a co-founder and the current Executive Director of The Contributor.
The Way a Field Gathers Rain
By Will Connelly
Come. Sit with us a while.
We are made of the same stuff as everything,
carbon and memory, water and wound,
the long slow turning of the earth
that does not ask us to be simple.
You have heard things.
You have known fear that had a voice,
or many voices,
rising up from somewhere deep in you
like something the body remembered
before the mind had words for it.
This is not so strange.
The roots of a tree go further down
than anyone walking above them knows.
We do not gather here to silence what lives in you.
We gather the way a field gathers rain,
openly, without judgment,
letting what falls, fall.
Bring your noise and your stillness.
Bring the voices that frighten you
and the ones you have almost learned to love.
Bring your suspicions, your tender places,
the long exhaustion of having to explain yourself
to a world that prefers things quiet.
You are not a diagnosis.
You are not a symptom.
You are a person:
large, complicated, containing multitudes,
and you have found your way here,
to this room,
to these people,
who know something of what you carry.
That is enough.
That has always been enough.