During Nashville’s historic ice storm this winter, one of our newspaper vendors died on the streets from hypothermia. Her name was Sharon, and she had a way of speaking that stayed with people. She spoke in biblical language that was mixed with survival, humor, intensity and deep conviction. She made strong eye contact, eye contact that was uncomfortably strong sometimes. You knew she was paying attention to you, and she expected you to pay attention back. Metro recently confirmed Sharon’s death, and Molly Davis and Evan Mealins reported on it in The Tennessean.
Sharon believed in The Contributor. She preached the benefits of selling newspapers to almost anyone who would listen because she understood that the work represented more than income. It gave people purpose, structure, dignity, and connection to a community. She was always trying to help someone else, encouraging another vendor, talking someone through a hard moment or trying to pull a new person into the fold.
I have been thinking about her death a lot lately, partly because it feels connected to the larger conversation happening in Nashville about homelessness. We continue to debate encampment closures, the removal of benches, public visibility, downtown development, and emergency responses, but we still struggle to build something that functions like a true system. We have many organizations, many talented and caring people, and many separate initiatives. What we do not have is shared ownership of the whole.
Almost 20 years ago, when I was doing street outreach as a younger and far less experienced worker, I found a man dead in an alley north of Broadway. I remember noticing that his posture looked strange before realizing what I was actually seeing. I still think about that moment sometimes because I honestly believed our community would eventually become much better at coordinating care for people experiencing homelessness. In many ways, it has. There are more outreach teams, more funding streams, more partnerships, more data systems, and more public attention than there were back then. But, people are still dying outside.
That reality should force us to ask harder questions about what we mean when we say “system.” A homelessness system is not simply a loose collection of nonprofits, government departments, hospitals, shelters and outreach workers operating in the same city. An effective system requires shared responsibility, shared goals, and leadership capable of seeing beyond organizational boundaries.
Right now, too much of the work remains fragmented. Organizations understandably become focused on their own grants, reporting requirements, staffing pressures and organizational survival. Government agencies operate within their own mandates. Hospitals focus on discharge planning. Outreach workers focus on immediate crises unfolding in front of them. Everyone may be working hard while the overall experience for someone living outside still feels chaotic, confusing and disconnected.
When systems become fragmented enough, people begin falling through spaces that nobody fully owns, and that is where some of the greatest harm occurs.
I think that is why the language of “system leadership” matters to me lately. To me, it means leadership that is willing to see the larger picture and remain accountable to outcomes that extend beyond a single organization’s or department’s success. It means leaders who can build trust across institutions instead of becoming defensive and protecting turf. It means including people with lived experience of homelessness in meaningful leadership roles instead of limiting them to storytelling or advisory positions with little actual authority. It also means being honest about the fact that no organization, including The Contributor, is outside of these tensions and contradictions.
Homelessness is connected to housing costs, mental health care, addiction, poverty, trauma, transportation, wages and isolation. Because of that, no single intervention will solve it. At the same time, fragmented systems can create their own form of trauma. People experiencing homelessness are often expected to navigate complicated networks of referrals, eligibility requirements, appointments, waitlists, transportation barriers, and institutional rules while already under enormous physical and psychological stress.
Over time, it becomes easier for systems to speak in categories instead of human beings. Someone becomes “high acuity,” “chronically homeless,” “service resistant,” “a difficult case,” or a “frequent utilizer.” Those terms may serve administrative purposes, but they can also create distance from the actual person standing in front of us.
Sharon resisted that kind of distance naturally. She saw people and remembered them. She believed people could matter to one another even while living through tremendous hardship.
I do not think Nashville lacks compassion. I see compassion every day among outreach workers, healthcare staff, nonprofit employees, volunteers, street newspaper vendors and ordinary residents. What I think we lack sometimes is the ability and urgency to move beyond fragmented compassion toward coordinated responsibility. A city that truly wants to reduce homelessness has to build systems that are capable of acting collectively and coherently, especially during moments of crisis. We need leadership that understands the systems we build should ultimately work for people like Sharon, not the other way around.
Otherwise, people will continue dying in the gaps between our organizations, our priorities, and our systems, and we will continue acting surprised when it happens.