When Will Connelly helped found The Contributor in 2007, nobody was paid for their work except for the vendors who sold the paper to customers on the streets. Now as the executive director in 2025, the organization employs 16 full-time staff members who work on housing vendors who sell the paper and connect them to services, raise funds for the organization and run the newspaper. His return in 2023 brought Connelly full circle back into the organization, which he describes as one founded on the principle of believing in people.
“I think that kind of approach is what we need in all the different parts of our homelessness system and response,” Connelly says. “We need this belief in people’s agency and dignity. That is what I remembered the spirit of The Contributor being.”
Connelly started out as a street outreach worker for the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA) more than 20 years ago. He worked in street outreach roles for Park Center, then the Metropolitan Homelessness Commission, then moved on to become a national leader and SOAR (SSI/SSDI Outreach, Access, and Recovery) program specialist, before returning to Nashville to lead the Metropolitan Homelessness Commission as its director in 2013.
Connelly made a name for himself as an innovative, thoughtful leader and is highly regarded in Nashville’s community from the unhoused community to nonprofit providers to policy makers and housing developers.
After his four-year stint at Metro government, he left for Denver, Colo., in 2017 to lead the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative and returned to Nashville as the CEO of Park Center a few years later.
You’ve now ended up in an organization where you are in close contact with the people you and your team serve and work with. Why did you choose to apply as the executive director for The Contributor, and what does that job mean to you?
I’ve had a special place in my heart for The Contributor since it started, and I’ve been proud to have played a small part in helping it get going. To me, The Contributor always represented a low-barrier pathway to earn an income. If you want to work, we’re here for you to work. There are no hoops to jump through or tests to pass. The Contributor believes in you. We believe that you can do it.
Having an opportunity to become the executive director seemed like a dream because when I left it, there wasn’t even a paid position in the organization. So, I’m just grateful to be part of an organization with a mission like that.
What is The Contributor and how has it evolved since its inception in 2007?
The Contributor is a street newspaper that is for people who are unhoused or have been unhoused. They can buy the newspaper from us for 50 cents and sell it for $2 plus tips to make an income. At its core, that’s what The Contributor is. It’s a street newspaper. A way to earn an income, a way to get acknowledged by what they write in the paper. So, people who sell the paper can also get articles published in the newspaper. It is a way not only to get some cash in their pockets by selling it but also to get their stories and their voice on paper and be heard through that. I think that’s really cool.
Since the pandemic, The Contributor has evolved from being only a newspaper. It started to add support services for vendors and other people who are unhoused in Nashville. That has brought depth to the organization and an ability to respond in a housing-focused way and other ways to help newspaper vendors and other folks to pursue the goals they have around housing, food security, getting health insurance and healthcare.
Another way we have evolved, especially lately, is to try to become an organization that finds ways for the vendor voice to show up not only in the newspaper but in other places as well. We want to be creative around including the voices of people who are unhoused in the work that we do. Lately that’s been in the Vendor Leadership Team that we have.
In addition, we now have people with lived experience train the new vendors that come in. We need some new swag, we need new T-shirts, and we’re asking vendors to design those. We’re trying to come up with all these different ways to include vendors in a way that’s not performative, but that’s legit.
What are some other significant changes at The Contributor you would like to highlight?
I’m proud of the work we do about integrating vendors’ voices into our organization’s efforts.
I’ve been a fan of helping people get entitlements like disability benefits through SOAR (SSI/SSDI Outreach, Access, and Recovery), which existed when I came here. But we are really starting to show the value of our services by creating new partnerships with the services that we offer. For example, we are in the middle of a couple of collaborations with hospitals to identify and support people who are unhoused and are coming through their emergency departments. This is something that you would not expect a street newspaper to do. But I’m proud of that pilot project and am interested in seeing what we learn through it.
Can you elaborate on that pilot program?
The nature of the pilot is that a local emergency department can waive their hand and ask us for help with a patient who is unhoused, uninsured and has a serious medical condition. The goal is for nurses and social workers in hospitals to be able to reach out to community organizations like us to get support, so that those patients can get on health insurance, and they can also make connections to our housing systems and other supports that they may need — such as a low-barrier income through The Contributor’s street paper program. We work together with Park Center, a local nonprofit that specializes helping people with mental illness, to prioritize disability benefit applications and provide housing navigation.
One of the cooler parts of this pilot is that we’re also doing street medicine rounds with emergency room physicians, so that people who are seen in the emergency department can also be followed up on by the ED doctors in their locations outside, after they are discharged from the hospital.
We have been doing this for a year now and are in the process of expanding the effort [to enter into] a similar partnership with Metro General Hospital.
What are some of the challenges in this job that you did not anticipate?
We are a small organization; and so, we all just jump in and wear many different hats. I didn’t anticipate that I would be necessarily working directly with people to try to help them stabilize their housing. I not only try to manage our organization as the executive director but I also help deliver services as a housing stability guide as part of that team. I also manage our staff, make sure we keep our contractual obligations, raise funding — there are so many different ways that I get to respond in this role that has brought me joy, but it is also extremely complex.
It’s brought me back to my roots as a service provider and put me in contact with so many wonderful people, people we try to support every day. While that’s really hard, I didn’t anticipate finding so much joy in it. I found so much joy in this work, even when it’s been overwhelming and I think it’s because of the proximity of the vendors. I really am in awe of people who sell the newspaper because I know more about them and know what they’ve gone through to get to this point, and they’re still showing up, cracking jokes, being themselves, getting comfortable being around us because we are being trusted. And all of that makes me really grateful to be here.
How do you balance these two sides — running and managing staff of a nonprofit and providing direct services?
It’s really tough to balance things. I don’t think I’m there yet. It’s always a work in progress. One thing I have to do, which I feel a little guilty about, is to organize my day through my Outlook calendar. This leaves less room for spontaneity in my day-to-day. It feels like every part of my day is choreographed because otherwise it’s hard to fit it all in.
Fortunately, we have a really cool team here. We have 16 people now working full-time at The Contributor, and I get to delegate things to them. I get so much support. When we meet as a team, we talk about the work, and we also check in with each other emotionally and mentally. We have really open conversations about how tough the work can be, how difficult it is to balance things, and how we’re navigating through all this change together, and how we can support each other through this change. I give a lot of credit to the people I work with because I wouldn’t be able to come close to balance it without them.
Where do you see The Contributor in five years time?
Advocacy and housing are words that come to mind.
On the advocacy front, I think that The Contributor can continue to use the newspaper as a place where you can really hear the voice of people who are unhoused and also use that voice to try to advocate for change in policy at the local and state levels. If there are bills and actions that make it more difficult for people to find housing, I feel like The Contributor should be amplifying the voices of people who are unhoused and also educate folks and policy makers why the implications of certain laws are if they go into effect. I see us speak more boldly and bravely like we have done in the last few months, especially with the litigation we have joined around the issues of obtaining SNAP benefits in Tennessee.
We are providing more housing-focused services right now. I’ve seen how real estate can transform an organization, so I have a dream that The Contributor would own property [and units] that we could use to offer deeply affordable housing to folks that we work with.
On the newspaper side, we want more people to sell the newspaper and also offer different ways for them to express themselves creatively. So, another word that comes to mind is arts. I think there is a lot we can do to engage people who are unhoused in free form art and connect that art to the newspaper.
What is your financial outlook with nonprofits nationwide worrying about potential federal cuts?
We’re coming up with different financial scenarios to try to prepare for what is happening at the federal level. The worst-case scenario almost cuts our funding in half for this year. We hope we won’t get close to this worst-case scenario, but we talk about it with the board and staff.
I think every nonprofit benefits from having unrestricted revenue and individual donations are one of the ways to get unrestricted revenue where we have flexible funding. I am proud of the fundraising plan we put together where we focus on the individual and corporate donors that we have and try to build community with them, wrap love around them and try to engage them more. We know that our current donors already love us, so we’re trying to deepen those relationships to see if we can get more connections through them.