Nashville Launch Pad aims to shelter, house homeless
queer youth with new Mobile Housing Navigation Center
As temperatures plummet, Tennessee’s unhoused youth endure the effects of a gap in available shelter and accessible housing options. Non-profit Nashville Launch Pad is working to help close that gap, one bed at a time.
Launch Pad has been assisting LGBTQIA+ young adults find housing in Nashville since it was established in 2014. They recently set out to expand their services to include a Mobile Housing Navigation Center, which has begun construction inside Connection United Methodist Church in collaboration with Community Care Fellowship.
The center is nearly finished and set to open in early November. HG Stovall, executive director of Launch Pad, called progress on the shelter units “fantastic.”
“We’ve had many volunteers sawing and hammering away, building room dividers in these former daycare rooms,” said Stovall. “Sort of dorm-style, if you will. It’s been fun to watch it happen. New faces, old faces; old faces, young faces. It’s been really heartwarming.”
Originally billed as an alternative to staying at a shelter or camping outside, Mobile Housing Navigation Centers aim to speed up the search for permanent housing. Clients are taken into the space and given a roof overhead for 120 days, as well intensive case management.
The case management at Launch Pad’s center will follow a Critical Time Intervention model, which emphasizes rapidly housing individuals and then slowly integrating community supports, like healthcare centers and other non-profits, into their daily lives. The approach is tailored to the individual’s needs, and case management is meant to end after the 120 day limit has been reached.
However, according to Community Care Fellowship Executive Director Ryan LaSuer, if the client still hasn’t found housing and still has serious need, an exception could be made to the time limit.
“It’s not like they have to leave the shelter for a certain amount of time before they can come back,” LaSuer said. “We’ve had guests that have gone past that time and we’re not going to exit them from the program as we’re working towards [housing].”
LaSuer, alongside the former director of Metro Homeless Impact Division, Judith Tackett, first conceptualized Mobile Housing Navigation Centers as they exist in the city today. LaSuer said the new center was a fortuitous opportunity for Launch Pad and Community Care Fellowship to lean on each other’s strengths.
“We knew we wanted to serve different demographics and different spaces, and when we decided on serving youth, HG was already a part of [Connection United Methodist Church], so it just made sense to partner with someone already serving youth.”
LaSuer also acknowledged some of the challenges that come with mobile housing navigation.
Due to the case management focus and finite space, the centers must limit their capacity somewhat — though he also noted that this can be beneficial for any clients who have trauma related to crowds or packed shelters.
He also noted that housing navigation can’t meet a citywide need for available low-barrier housing, childcare centers, and other community supports, all of which require significant resources to create.
“A developer that I was talking to said, ‘they’re not making any more dirt,’ in a sense of not having enough space, sometimes, to even build more affordable housing.”
LaSuer said projects like the Mobile Housing Navigation Centers had the advantage of being able to make economic use of church space, comparing them to tiny home villages, and was hopeful that these sorts of spaces would help make existing housing accessible to more and more people.
Stovall thanked the dozens of volunteers putting the Launch Pad center together, noting that the “retired straight guys and trans millennials” working together so well was a welcome microcosm of their larger mission.
“It’s hard work, but it’s life-changing,” said HG Stovall. “It feels like my calling.”
As for the value of a demographic-based center like Launch Pad’s, Stovall said that it’s pragmatic as well as compassionate. LGBTQIA+ young adults comprise 40% of the homeless population in that age range despite only comprising 7% of the total young adult population, according to youth homelessness non-profit True Colors United.
While Launch Pad’s services – and consequently, the new mobile housing center – will not be restricted to queer clients, there will be a focus on affirming those experiences and creating a secure space for LGBTQIA+ youth.
“The data is that LGBT young adults are 120% more likely to experience homelessness than their straight counterparts,” he said. “What we do is open and affirming to LGBTQ+ individuals and their allies.”
Stovall also explained that seeing and living alongside situations familiar to one’s own can restore a sense of hope sometimes lost in the din of government buildings and shelter lobbies.
“What we know from experience, from the commentary of young adults we have served, is that they find Launch Pad to be a place of hope,” Stovall. “They have found the adult-serving shelters to not be as hope-filled. If you walk into a space and you see people that are 50, 70 years old, and they don’t have housing, it can be easy to decide that you will have the same path. If you walk into a space with other people your age, you can build a network to support each other and break that cycle.”
LaSuer echoed Stovall’s hopes for a more interconnected community, saying that shelter projects like these benefit from different agencies working with common purpose.
“We will be opening some additional sites hopefully by the beginning of next year and are opening to partner with other agencies to open those sites,” said LaSuer. “That’s ultimately how we do things well: by coming together in a collaborative way with all of the other nonprofits … and connecting those dots. Even if we could, we don’t want to do this work by ourselves. We want to do it together.”