The Contributor launches tour led by street paper vendors to help folks see the city through a different lens
The Contributor has launched Unseen Nashville, its new walking tour in Downtown Nashville, which highlights the views and personal stories of trained guides with lived experience who are also Contributor vendors.
Unseen Nashville was developed by The Contributor’s Vendor Leadership Team, four of whose members immediately signed up as tour guides. The vendors have been actively shaping Unseen Nashville from the beginning.
Unseen Nashville is a social city walking tour that takes folks through a mile of Downtown Nashville. This is a tour about homelessness given from the viewpoint of a person who has lived through it.
Participants will have an opportunity to learn what it means to be unhoused and unseen. The tour will happen rain or shine (except in dangerous inclement weather), and people need to be prepared for heat and cold — and the noise that Downtown brings. These are all things that people who are unhoused often cannot escape.
Through personalized stories, the Unseen Nashville tour will offer data and context, cover policies that shape where people can go, highlight the importance of places like the Downtown Library, and discuss access to transportation, food and services. Unseen Nashville guides will also talk about solutions — and those that may not work so much — like criminalization of homelessness.
Unseen Nashville tour guides include Lisa Abell, Keith Doering, Shawn Lesley and Pedro Lopez. I asked some of them why they signed up as tour guides.
“I want people to be aware of homelessness and how it works in Nashville,” Keith said.
And Pedro added, “The proceeds help the homeless. And that’s something that I’m passionate about, the homeless.”
Tour guides will be paid an hourly living-wage rate, including the time it takes them to travel to and from home. In addition, we will encourage participants to purchase a newspaper or zine from them at the end of the tour.
Shawn said he signed up as an Unseen guide, “because I felt like I was treated wrong, coming back to my hometown, and I don’t want others to be mistreated just because they’re homeless, and they can’t make it or feel like they wish that someone was there.”
He explained that in his view, the Unseen Nashville tours will help people see that there are folks — like the tour guides — who are trying to make a difference.
“We’re trying to change things and make things better for all of us,” Shawn said, adding that he wants “for the next generation to come along to say, ‘Hey, I heard The Contributor and Unseen is helping people. They’re trying to better things.’”
We also asked the three tour guides who were present at our last meeting what experiences they would like for tour participants to learn about through Unseen Nashville.
“My experience was rough,” Shawn said. “Being homeless on the street, down in the rain, snow, heat, all day, every day, that takes a toll on you. Especially when you’re dealing with depression. And it’s all mainly depression that everybody deals with.”
Keith said he wanted participants to understand, “that it’s very easy to get into homelessness because many people are one paycheck away from being homeless.
“I mean, a lot of people have no savings at all, no emergency fund,” he said. “If they get sick for two weeks and can’t work, they risk being homeless. It’s not simple to get back on the train. You can fall into homelessness in one day, and it could take you one year to get to climb back out.”
And Pedro added, “There’s a lot of homeless that are unseen. And we need to see them.”
Keith said he hopes by the end of the tour participants will realize that many people have it worse than they do.
“You see an injured cat on the sidewalk, and everybody wants to pile in and help, but they’ll step right over a person wrapped up in a blanket when it’s 20 degrees and won’t even look at him,” Keith said. “So I want people to get more compassion for other people that have it worse than they do.”
Pedro added that showing compassion means a lot. “Just last week somebody gave me a sleeping bag, and I saw somebody who was just lying on the ground. I gave him that sleeping bag.”
All of the tour guides are currently in housing, and thanks to their work with The Contributor as independent vendors, they have been able to supplement their income and maintain housing.
Gerald B., who is working on housing and is interested in becoming a tour guide, said he hopes Unseen Nashville will help, “make people aware and give them an avenue to help if they so choose.”
My work with Unseen Nashville was an effort to ensure people from churches, schools, tourists, politicians, businesspeople, and even folks working in the nonprofit sector are given a different viewpoint. I believe we have stigmatized homelessness to the point that even when we mean well and want to include the voices of people with lived experiences, we still create barriers in doing so.
Their stories are too often told through someone without lived experience — including including the author of this feature. That’s why it is important for me to continue to find ways I can help people get heard directly without me or anyone else as a filter for their message.
But I am proud of the fact that this is a tour created by the people who have gone through the experience of homelessness. Participants will learn directly about what it actually means to be homeless in Nashville — or many other cities, for that matter. And as we continue doing the tours, I am convinced that as the confidence of our guides grows, each tour will become increasingly individualized based on the engagement and back and forth with the audience.
At the same time, we also need to be clear that this is still a tour that helps promote The Contributor whose purpose is to create community. Building community means that people feel comfortable with others. They feel heard. That’s why there is a newspaper whose content is driven by vendors who sell it on the streets. Unseen Nashville is another such product and there will be some consistency in how we talk about The Contributor’s work, the different products, and services.
Each tour will be led by one of the Unseen guides, accompanied by either Will Connelly or myself to help out with logistics and some facts and policy questions.
The vision of Unseen Nashville has been simmering with The Contributor for a long time — ever since the organization’s co-founder, Tom Wills, participated in a similar tour in Athens, Greece. Then, in May 2022, I went on a social city tour in Basel, Switzerland. It was an hour-long street tour led by Benno Fricker, a vendor of a Swiss street paper. You can read about that experience in the issue published in Contributor Vol. 16, No. 13, in June 2022..
When I returned to The Contributor, Tom, Cathy Jennings, and I started exploring opportunities to introduce a street tour led by The Contributor right here in Nashville. With Will Connelly coming on as the new executive director, we seriously started our planning and training with the Vendor Leadership Team.
- As part of the tour guide training, we have conducted a few practice tours over the summer, which provided invaluable input for improvements. Our Unseen Nashville tour participants also left us with some encouraging feedback, such as:
- I think this is a very useful tool to educate and/or inform the public, especially people who are not familiar with Homelessness. Great project. Thank you.
- I loved the tour. I’m so excited that Nashville will be offering these soon!!
- I loved starting at Church Street Park, then moving to the Capitol, the WeGo station, and ending at The Contributor. Wonderful stuff.
- This is such an important and impactful opportunity, and I am grateful The Contributor is leading this work.
Large groups interested in scheduling a tour should email unseen@thecontributor.org. Tour dates and times are at https://thecontributor.org/unseen-nashville-tours.