Cathy Jennings started with The Contributor as a volunteer in 2012. After serving as a board member for a couple of years, she took on the role of executive director and implemented a vision that takes the traditional street paper model and combines it with a person-centered approach that focuses on vendor’s needs including income, housing, support services and long-term employment.
For this issue, we talked with Cathy Jennings, the executive director of The Contributor Inc., about our organization’s purpose, structures, and needs.
Could you give us a brief history of The Contributor?
The Contributor launched in 2007. It was the brainchild of four local homeless advocates who are well-known in our field. They were Tasha French, who was the first executive director, Will Connelly, Steven Samra (both used to work for Park Center around that time) and Tom Wills. Tom still serves as our director of vending. He and his family have a long history with Downtown Presbyterian Church, which became the home base for The Contributor.
The four founders came together to launch a street paper as a means to challenge stereotypes surrounding homelessness and offer low-barrier, immediate workforce opportunities for individuals experiencing homelessness. The concept is that a person with lived experience, called a vendor, purchases the paper for 25 cents and sells it for a profit. In the beginning the sales price was $1. Currently, the purchase price is 50 cents and the sales price is $2.
Thus, The Contributor functions as a micro-business where a vendor purchases a stack of newspapers every two weeks when we publish a new issue and sells it for a profit. The paper created a database to track vendor sales and hired staff to provide stability and serve as a liaison with the International Network of Street Papers (INSP). The Contributor newspaper was so successful that, at one-point, vendors sold over 100,000 papers in the Middle Tennessee area every two weeks.
Over time, lack of adequate funding, increases in cost and competition with a church-based street paper out of Kentucky, and decreases in people reading printed papers became an issue. A new executive director tried out the European model for a street magazine. That was around the time I became a board member. We quickly learned that there was no appetite for readers to pick up a magazine from a street vendor, and the vendors, who are actually The Contributor’s main customers, did not like the new format.
The board decided that we needed a drastic change or to close our doors. That’s when I stepped into the executive director role in late 2018 and I am still here.
Why did you take that step?
I saw the need in our community to elevate the issues of homelessness, especially through the voices of our vendors. As a former volunteer, I always believed in the value of The Contributor’s low-barrier access to employment and saw the potential to build on the relationship that volunteers and staff have with the people who seek us out to become vendors and launch their own micro-business.
The Contributor remains the product of vendors, and we ensure that 35 percent of the paper’s content is filled with vendor articles. Our data shows that our readers love to hear directly from people with lived experience.
Under your leadership, The Contributor Inc. has grown as a nonprofit. While the street paper is still the crucial part of the organization, explain the overall organizational model and vision behind it?
The Contributor has evolved into a sophisticated ecosystem that empowers our unhoused neighbors on a path to establishing micro-businesses, earning income, finding housing and self-advocating, all of which restore their self-confidence, their dignity and their community.
Our two core programs are a) the newspaper vendor business and b) our Rapid Rehousing program called C.O.V.E.R. (Creating Opportunities for Vendor Employment/Engagement and Residency), which includes housing, supportive services and SOAR.
Our front door is the newspaper. People approach us to become vendors because of our low-barrier access to income. In 2019, we began our relationship with SNAP E&T*, a program we use to help vendors on their journey to self-sufficiency. Through SNAP E&T we subsidize birth certificates, help with ID replacements, provide bus passes, and connect vendors to our other employment partners.
Because The Contributor is part of the press, when COVID hit in early 2020, we were one of the few nonprofits who were legally able to keep our physical doors open. We are centrally located downtown and with churches and nonprofits closing their physical locations, we were able to help hundreds of people who all of a sudden were stranded without the usual supports. Libraries that offered internet access, restaurants, and churches were closed. It was the first time in Nashville that people experiencing outdoor homelessness went hungry. We retained food through SNAP and a partnership with Rethink foods, we applied for stimulus checks and unemployment, and just connected with people to help meet their needs.
When federal CARES Act funding became available, and we saw the immense need, we applied for Emergency Solutions Grant dollars and launched our Rapid Rehousing program. We carefully listened to our vendors and the people we served and saw a need for SOAR (SSI/SSDI Outreach, Access, and Recovery), a program that assists individuals to obtain SSI and SSDI. And recently, we were selected as a Metro contractor to provide Critical Time Intervention case management, which will help us continue our Rapid Rehousing program after the federal COVID dollars run out.
So, we have grown into an organization with several doors. People can walk up physically to our front door and enter this ecosystem of support, employment, housing and community building. As part of our federal and local grants, we also take referrals through the community’s coordinated entry process. The key for us is to listen to the people we serve. We recognize that our low-barrier access to employment and housing, and how we journey alongside people with them being the drivers of their destiny attracts many folks to us who otherwise have stopped working with traditional case management approaches.
We are applying the same philosophy that started with the street paper approach — we fill gaps based on what people tell us and we partner within the community to ensure every person has a chance to achieve their own goals.
The Contributor is unique in that it is based on people’s choices and elevates their voices in the community. Can you talk about why that is so important?
Absolutely, the uniqueness of The Contributor truly lies in its emphasis on people’s choices and their voices within the community. It is about empowering individuals and recognizing their agency in improving their own lives. What sets us apart is that 35 percent of our paper’s content is actually created by vendors themselves. We believe that everyone, regardless of their circumstances, has valuable insights to share.
Since 2007, The Contributor newspaper has been a platform for those experiencing homelessness to express themselves through articles and artwork, and we compensate them for their contributions. Through writing workshops, we’ve nurtured their writing skills, enabling many participants to become confident voices in their community. This empowerment has led some of them to actively engage in decision-making processes whether at individual nonprofits or on community boards.
Our Contributor Business Breakfasts, held twice monthly, are a cornerstone of our approach. Attended by 60-100 individuals with lived experience of chronic homelessness, these gatherings incorporate participant perspectives into the agenda. And they are a hub for the larger community to interact with our vendors. We’ve had council members, prospective mayors and most recently representatives from Vanderbilt University Medical Center seek input from participants at our Business Breakfasts. We also use them to organize flu shot clinics, job fairs, voter registration, participatory budgeting, and other activities. Not only are these meetings informative, but they also provide a sense of community and fun. Importantly, the input received at these meetings shapes programs like our Rapid Rehousing program called C.O.V.E.R. influencing everything from service offerings to staff structure.
We’re also expanding our outreach through new initiatives like our street tour Unseen Nashville, which aims to educate the public and document homelessness from the viewpoint of those living on the streets. Our commitment to listening and providing a platform for voices empowers people to find an avenue to self-advocate, a distinct difference than someone else advocating on your behalf.
How do you respond to people who view The Contributor as a way to panhandle?
I used to respond politely. Haha. I mean, it’s another stereotype right? To most, standing on the street corner means you are panhandling when at one time in our history, the only way to get news was to buy it from a man standing on a street selling it. The Contributor is a different kind of nonprofit, a social enterprise. We sell newspapers to homeless people who work for themselves. They train to learn how to sell papers to you, they keep the money they earn, and they buy more when they need to replace their stock. As they return to the office to buy more papers, we engage with them. We walk with and support them as they regain stability and rejoin their community to improve their quality of life. Our staff helps people find housing, furniture to move into housing, get health insurance, seek education, find other jobs, etc.
Our biggest fans don’t always get this. They see the humanity of the vendor but misunderstand the model, seeking to help the vendor by not taking the paper. This strips the dignity, relationship and support we offer through continued visits from the vendor. Taking the paper makes our model work, not taking it breaks it.
So yes, there is a HUGE difference between selling The Contributor newspaper and panhandling.
What are The Contributor’s most pressing needs to continue and maybe even grow the business model you just presented?
We need volunteers in our office. They are an integral part of our team. We need customers to buy and take the paper from our vendors (or subscribe in their name). The Contributor accepts Venmo to purchase the paper. And we need monthly donations to pay for the gaps not covered by restricted funding. We are a community of people lifting up our vulnerable neighbors. The Contributor is the vehicle that fills the gap, moving our chronically homeless neighbors not only off the streets, but helping them become Contributors in our community.
*The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Employment and Training helps eligible participants achieve their vocational goals and increase self-sufficiency through funded education, skills training, and supportive services.