Melissa Thomas is the Executive Director and CEO of The Branch of Nashville, which is a community resource center on the property of the Antioch United Methodist Church on Tusculum Road.
Thomas came to this work after doing disaster relief, first on the Gulf Coast in response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, then as the Executive Director of Southeast Nashville Recovery that managed the repair and rehab of hundreds of homes after the 2010 flood.
“As we finished doing flood work between 2010 and 2012, we had seen deeper needs in the community,” Thomas said. “We reached out and asked community leaders about what they thought we should all use our collective energy to address next. Food insecurity rose up.”
Thomas said that after talking to Second Harvest, they identified the need of having a good food pantry in the Southeast area.
What is The Branch?
We started out as a food pantry. But from the very beginning, we wanted to look at long-term solutions and provide ways to support our neighbors in a way that could get them into a better place and not just always being food insecure. It’s been years of journeying through that to understand, hear, and learn what our neighbors express as needs.
And so, we are positioning ourselves as a community resource center. We have a social worker on staff. She is building a team of resource navigators and people that can do case management. We take care of some specific work with older adults. We come alongside people to learn about and coach them towards what they need to fill their personal gaps. We do a lot of food assistance, and we teach English language learning classes. So those are basically the things that happen at The Branch right now.
What does community building mean to you, and how did you get onto this particular career path?
This whole effort from the flood recovery to where The Branch is now, is just a journey of walking together with the community and neighbors and learning what people want or need or what the gaps are.
One of the things I think is very important is that community building reflects the collective voice of everyone. I’m not saying that we’ve gotten there. I’m saying that the goal in this community-building effort is that we know what the whole of the community sees as their needs, and that’s going to be people who are struggling and that’s people who are maybe doing OK. What do they see as the needs in this community?
And then as you identify what thriving looks like or what a healthy community is, I think it’s all of us locking arms together to work towards that. Each of us has a role and a place. It could be as simple as a grandma at home [baking] cookies to take to neighbors to just give them hope. We’ve all got places and parts to play.
So it’s not like I set out and said, “Hey, I’m getting on this path to do this community building.” It was more about, “OK, there are these needs around us, people that are struggling to have enough food and don’t have enough work and other things. How best can we support those individuals?” Which then grows into a larger group of people, which organically leads to, “We’ve all got to work together because we all have a part in that.”
What are some important values that carry you forward as a leader in this work?
I would say that for me, one of the most core values is how we view others. That is extremely critical. I believe that every single human is an image bearer of God. And if we recognize that and agree with and believe that … it drives how we treat others. So I believe that the way we view others is critical.
I also believe that in community building, we have to recognize a term that I learned back in 2017 from an organization in Atlanta called the Lupton Center. I went there on a field trip. They’ve been working for many years in community building and one of the terms that they taught is mutuality. Mutuality recognizes that we can all learn and grow from each other. The person we may see as needing help also brings assets to a relationship. So what can I learn from them? How can they help me? We have to remind ourselves that while we may view ourselves as a helper to others, we have to remember that the other person has much to give, to offer, and likely has solutions to their own situations. So I find mutuality to be very important and not as understood as it needs to be.
Humility and teachableness will open roads ahead for us. Maintaining that posture as a leader [and recognizing that] I don’t know everything, I think is very important. It puts others in a place where they feel safe with you.
Another element of leadership is the willingness to speak for others who can’t speak for themselves. I think all of us have responsibilities in that area. All of us have some way that we need to speak up for someone else.
And then obviously, leadership involves tenacity, drive, bite, persistence, determination, faith, lots of things that you would typically attribute to leadership to move a community or an agenda forward.
Tell me about The Better Futures Coalition of Southeast Nashville.
Well, I would say that I instigated The Better Futures Coalition, but The Branch does not own this coalition. In fact, when we have the meetings at The Branch, we often say that in the room because we want everybody to realize this is a coalition. It’s not The Branch’s. It belongs to the community.
We began meeting in December of 2022 as we were recognizing the need for our community to figure out a way to convene, to be in space together, to network, collaborate, that kind of thing. The idea was, “What if we all meet together and know each other and work together?” Part of that idea includes community members, not just nonprofit leaders, some business leaders and some educational institutions, but also community members.
You can look up betterfuturesco.org. We work to bring community members, service providers, and stakeholders together to identify needs, share knowledge and coordinate support. And then at our meetings, we work. We may talk for a few minutes about what is going on that is mutually affecting each of us as a community. But then we break off into work groups.
Those work groups currently consist of a group that is working on housing solutions, a group that is working on education and economic mobility, and then another group that is working specifically on issues related to immigrants and refugees. As we break into those groups, we spend 45 minutes to an hour on solving problems, brainstorming on what we’re seeing and how to increase access to services for folks and discussing how we can lock our arms and make this community better. So we’ll convene anywhere from 25 to 40 people who meet regularly once a month to do this work.
In this coalition, my role is that of one member. I’m just one voice and we’re all trying to elevate everyone else’s voices.
Describe how you have seen the Antioch/Southeast Community change over the past few years?
I’m only one viewpoint. So I want to make sure that people understand that I can’t speak for the whole of the community.
I think life has gotten better for some. You can look at Antioch, and you can see real economic growth with the Tanger Mall, restaurants, shopping and new apartments. You can see some visible signs that things have gotten better for so many people.
Then, on the other side, life has gotten harder for many people as rent and affordability impacts a significant portion of neighbors we’re working with and neighbors who are barely surviving. We see [tremendous] need amongst older adults who thought they’d saved enough money, but the declining value of the dollar has affected them [to a point] where they never ever could have imagined they would need to come get some food assistance.
We see the affordability issues in housing in Southeast Nashville, which are also reflective of the whole of Nashville. Many neighbors are moving even farther south than Antioch. So we’ve seen a lot more movement towards Rutherford County and other outlying counties where it feels like life might be a little more affordable.
How would you define Antioch/Southeast Community?
We’ve taken our lead from a man by a name you will probably know, Jay Voorhees. He was the minister of Antioch United Methodist Church back during the flood. His church hosted the initial flood recovery, and that’s where I came to at that time. Jay spoke up and said, ”I would consider Southeast Nashville 37013, 37211, and 37217.” We have adopted that and kept with that same attitude.
Now the Coalition would add 37210.
What are some of the biggest concerns you have when you look at this community?
Along the lines of the concerns are the rhetoric about immigrants. It feels like an attack on humanity. It feels like an attack on our neighbors and an attack on our community. There are many false narratives that are repeated so often that people believe they’re true, and they believe them without doing their research. And so, as I mentioned earlier, we’re going to speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves, and we’re going to tell what we know to be the facts, what we know the truth to be.
Along that same line of concern about our neighbors who may be the victim of marginalization and un-factual rhetoric is the need to educate everyone, including other members of our community who may not know what’s true. Ultimately what we want is a community where we’re walking shoulder to shoulder and in appreciation for each person and what assets and beauty they bring to the community.
And then there are just some typical gaps and services that we see as concerns in our neighborhood. We see gaps that are with people experiencing homelessness. We see gaps in service for the aging, gaps in mental health. And so these are issues that The Branch works to address, but we do so with the broader Coalition.
Where do you see some of the biggest opportunities?
As we work harder to convene conversations and hear from neighbors of all [backgrounds] as to what they want this community to look like, that’s going to be very important. It’s a great opportunity.
The Branch is starting to expand towards those more focused, intentional conversations so that we can expand the resources our community wants and needs in order to thrive.
In addition to that, we currently lease property here at 41 Tusculum Road from the Antioch United Methodist Church. We’re working towards an arrangement with our two parties to negotiate an eventual purchase that would support the future and the continued legacy for the church congregation at Antioch United Methodist, and it would also increase our ability to work with our community towards mutual thriving.
And then bigger picture, as we partner with the Coalition, we can do so much more than we can just than we can do by ourselves. So The Branch can do a certain amount of things, the Coalition can do so much more.
What are your goals for the next five years?
To increase community interaction and mutual support. To build a robust team of people who can walk with neighbors towards their better futures. To establish resource solutions in partnership with the community that create a healthy community resource center. We want to support additional attainable housing solutions in Southeast Nashville. And we want to see the Coalition become more established as a recognized entity that is supporting neighbors towards their own better futures.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
I want to emphasize something that I haven’t said through all of this and that a typical CEO may not say. And that is that love is the basis of all of this.
I’m a woman of faith and my holy book is the Bible. It should, for a person who is a follower of Christ, inform how we live and how we conduct ourselves. And I’m reminded of a passage in 1 Corinthians 13, that’s called the Love Chapter, that basically says, we may speak with flowery words and say great eloquent things, or we may give everything we have to the poor, or we may become a martyr for our faith, or we may be able to expound the mysteries of God, but if we don’t have love we’re nothing, we’re bankrupt.
And so the base of what we do and why we do it on this property at The Branch is love. It’s that we recognize how much we’ve been loved by God and therefore, that allows us to love others. That’s it.