After a 15-year stint at the Oasis Center, Mark Dunkerley will step down as President and Chief Executive Officer on June 30.
He had started with Oasis Center as a street outreach volunteer, was hired on as their director of development, and moved through the ranks as vice president of development, chief strategy officer, and became President and CEO in 2021.
As Dunkerley describes it, Oasis Center is “the place in town where families, teenagers and young adults turn in their time of crisis.”
“We have 20 different programs and serve a wide variety of the needs of the most marginalized youth in our city and try to provide them dignity and community, so that they feel connected and hopeful for the future,” he added.
Dunkerly is taking some time to recharge, and then he’s looking at a couple of things he might pursue.
How did you first learn about and get involved in the Oasis Center, and what was it that made this organization so attractive to you?
I was starting a beer company called Jubilee that was going to give half of its profit to a charity. A friend of mine from high school was working at the Oasis Center at the time. I had just moved into town, and I didn’t really know the landscape of Nashville nonprofits at that point. So, I just asked if I could come down and learn about Oasis and pick his brain about what organizations might be good to reach out to, to see about being a beneficiary of the beer business.
It was 2009. Oasis had just opened its doors of the Youth Opportunity Center, and I was amazed at the space. I had never been at a nonprofit that created a place where youth could feel good and wanted to be. You could tell; they were very intentional about that.
But really it was the people. The people and the work. I got to know a lot of people in the organization. I was just really blown away by the breadth of services Oasis did and their approach of how they went about working with young people — viewing them as stakeholders, valuing their voice, and having kind of an entrepreneurial approach to the work.
I just fell in love with the place, and then I started volunteering doing street outreach shortly after that. That’s when I really understood the importance of the work that Oasis and so many organizations around town do, this interacting with young adults that were living on the street and hearing what they said about Oasis.
I’ll always remember there was this one young person who was really the first young person who spoke to me. He came up to me and said he was struggling, he was bipolar, and he was off his medications. He also suffered, as so many young people do, from addiction. He said he was so lonely and [had been] crying all through the night. And he didn’t want to but just started drinking to numb the pain and found himself walking the streets of Nashville. He was not sure how it happened, but he woke up on the steps of Oasis. Somewhere in him he knew that we would be in a place that would take care of him in the morning.
That’s always stuck with me. That was probably the turning point for me where I was like, “OK, this is an organization that I really admire, and I’d like to spend even more time with.”
Shortly thereafter, I was hired on full time to do development work.
Oasis Center has always been seen as the main youth homelessness provider in town, even though, as far back as 2016, homelessness programs were a rather small portion of your budget. Why do you think that is?
Some of it depends on the audience and what they’re looking at. But the city, as you know, at the time, we were the only people doing anything related to youth and young adult homelessness. The issue of youth homelessness is not one that a lot of people thought about until really you and I started the Key Action Plan (in 2016).
I think that’s part of it. Oasis Center was thought of as the teen/young adult solution in the homelessness world. At the time, I think there were not a lot of options.
For the last 30 something years, Oasis had a heavy youth-voice side in our work and heavy engagement in the community for young folks who were still sometimes at the margin of society but not necessarily homeless.
There are just so many different things that Oasis provides. And when people take a tour, they are always surprised at how many different things we do.
How does Oasis Center define youth homelessness?
What we usually use is, “If you don’t have a key to your own place.” That’s our loose definition of homelessness. If you don’t have your own key, we consider you sitting in that category of experiencing homelessness.
How has youth homelessness changed over the past 15 years?
I think youth homelessness has changed from a couple of lenses. One is, as Nashville has gotten bigger, the problem has gotten larger. As great as a city as we are in many aspects, we are not immune from the realities of growth. As rents have increased dramatically, it’s become harder and harder, for young adults especially, to be able to afford a place to live in Nashville.
We’ve definitely seen a lot of growth in Nashville’s homeless young adult population. Part of that is the city’s growth, and a part of that I think we’ve been more intentional since the early Key Action Plan days of acknowledging and looking at young adult homelessness.
I think the third piece is when the city got the YHDP (Youth Homelessness Demonstration Project) grant, it gave us more resources to actually do things, which I think that brings more people out. If there are no resources, there is no reason for people to stand up and be counted or to come to our door necessarily. But once there are resources there, you start to see the larger picture, which is that young people are experiencing homelessness in our city — much more than most people would think because they really still are the invisible people in the homelessness sector.
What are the dangers if our country, our state, and our city do not get a handle on youth homelessness?
I think there is a short-term and a long-term [perspective]. With any time of preventative work, which I would say, the earlier you start something the better your chances of success are.
If services for young adults and youth go away right now, today’s young people who are experiencing homelessness will be tomorrow’s chronic adults.
I think there is a very real risk of long-term overall numbers of Nashvillians experiencing homelessness going up. I think that is the long-term reality. I don’t think there is any scenario where that doesn’t happen.
Then I think in the short-term you’re going to have a lot of young adults who are currently being housed through Rapid Rehousing or through family reunification efforts, you’re going to have several hundred young adults a year move back out onto the streets.
Rapid Rehousing is a time-limited intervention that cities tend to invest in heavily. Do you think that’s enough or are we lacking in permanent supportive housing for youth and young adults?
There is definitely a need for more permanent supportive housing for young people.
What is needed to truly make a difference in ending homelessness for young people?
The first thing continues to be awareness that this is an issue. I feel like within the CoC (Continuum of Care) and the service provider community it is now acknowledged much more than it was six to eight years ago. But I think the broader Nashville community probably still does not think [of youth and young adults when they think about homelessness].
So, number one, continue awareness. Number two, we’re having success with the YHDP funds. It would be great to build upon that and layer additional funding into permanent supportive housing [and] into a permanent shelter-type situation.
What are your parting words to other nonprofit CEOs and executive directors, especially in an environment where they are facing drastic budget cuts?
It’s a combination of a) hang in there, but b) lean into each other.
We did some pretty important work without federal funding before as a community, at least as it relates to youth homelessness. There may be an opportunity for us to lean into it together, collaborate more, and see what we can make happen. It’s easier to be siloed when you have some funding, so you don’t need to get creative. But that would be kind of my dual approach.