For a year-end interview, we spoke with Whitney Pastorek, a writer and community organizer who most recently has served as the executive producer of City Cast Nashville. In that role, she and her team have kept Nashvillians informed about local news and events through a daily newsletter and podcast.
“It’s about a 25-minute podcast every day,” Pastorek explained. “And the newsletter shows up in your inbox with the four biggest news stories of the morning, a great article about something that’s happening in town, or life hacks for ways to make life easier, and then terrific events listings.”
City Cast Nashville launched in June 2024 and is part of a national network covering 13 cities across the country. Nashville Scene readers honored City Cast Nashville as the best podcast in 2025.
You are a communicator and community organizer. How would you describe your career path?
I have had the opportunity since moving to Nashville almost 15 years ago to really get involved with some great organizations here in town.
I started off organizing in progressive politics and working on campaigns for people like Sean Parker, Charlane Oliver and Vincent Dixie. Then I had the immense privilege of being the Nashville project lead for World Central Kitchen for four years, which is José Andrés’ hunger and disaster relief organization. That led me to meet so many people in so many different community-based organizations and neighborhoods.
You really get to know a community when it’s just experienced something terrible, and you find out a lot about what people need and who they are. So, I think I’ve just sort of had this blessed ability to get to know so many different corners of Nashville. It’s allowed me to have a lot of friends and hear a lot of stories about things that are happening in town that sometimes might get overlooked. Combining that with my obsessive need to watch Metro Council and know what’s happening with our local government, it led me to hopefully be able to move some needles for good here.
How did your background in politics and community organizing lead to your current job with City Cast?
My background prior to getting to Nashville was in journalism, and it was also in country music artist management and marketing. So I have a lot of journalism and communications background. I think it gives me this really unique skill set where I have the skills of a journalist, but I also have the personal relationships and personal passions and compassions for my city and the people who are trying to make it better every day.
You serve on the Metro Human Relations Commission. What’s the role of the MHRC and why did you take on this volunteer role?
MHRC is the department within Metro that is tasked with ensuring that the city remains welcoming and equitable to all. Its strict role, as I understand it, is really to mediate any discrimination complaints that come against Metro or within Metro. A great example of that is what happened with the Metro Arts Commission in 2024.
But in between that, we’re able to do so much other stuff in terms of working on language access or the No Hate on My Plate dinners that we’ve been hosting. It’s really a commission that is tasked with doing exactly what I’ve been talking about, which is ensuring that people feel welcome, that they feel connected, that everybody’s voice matters, and that people have opportunities to get out and be in community with one another and feel valued no matter who they are in this town.
I volunteered because of all the Metro boards and commissions I felt like it was the one that best suited what I believe in. And I feel very fortunate to be a member.
You have been involved in the nonprofit world for years including keeping a watch on what is happening around homelessness. What could Nashville do better in terms of addressing homelessness?
Everything. Unfortunately, I feel as though Nashville is trending in the wrong direction when it comes to taking care of our unhoused neighbors. And I don’t really understand why when we’ve had, thanks to COVID and the American Rescue Plan, more money than ever before to pour into finding solutions for our friends who — through whatever set of circumstances — don’t have a warm, safe roof to sleep under every night.
It’s immensely frustrating to me. I think that there are so many people in this town who know so much about this space and who work tirelessly — literally— on the ground every day in trying to address these issues. And there are times when I feel like the leadership at the Metro level is simply unable or unwilling to get down and dirty in that same way. So I think the biggest thing that I would like to see change in the new year — aside from everything — is a willingness to collaborate and work together with the folks who have that granular day-to-day knowledge of their community, of their neighbors, of their friends.
I think about a place like Trinity Community Commons, which has become such a beacon in our neighborhood for togetherness and community and is welcoming of people all across the spectrum here in East Nashville. It should be a model for how addressing the issues of homelessness [could be] happening all across the city. It shouldn’t be limited to just one church and a bunch of neighbors who care a lot. It should be the way that we start every single day.
This is our end of year issue. In your view, what was the biggest local story of 2025?
We have so many. But if I have to … obviously, everything that was happening at the federal level and the state level in terms of cuts and dismantlings was huge, and that had a trickle-down effect on so many local organizations and nonprofits and people trying to do good.
But to me, the biggest story was and has continued to be this disconnect between the city’s priorities and the priorities of the people who live in it. The example that I’ll use is the ongoing controversy around the National Downtown Partnership, and the way that they handle the area that they’re tasked with managing, which is our urban core. The most specific [example] in terms of this was their decision in collaboration with NDOT (Nashville Department of Transportation) and a couple other folks to remove those benches along Korean Veterans Boulevard. Hostile architecture is not a new thing for our unhoused community, but there’s hostile architecture and then there’s removing architecture entirely.
And in taking those benches away, you suddenly saw so many people in town just get it — like, “My God, people can’t even just sit anymore!” Whether you’re unhoused or whether you’re waiting for a bus or whether you’re a Downtown worker on your lunch break. That one choice, I think, has sparked a real movement here where you’ve got neighbors going out on weekends and building benches to put at bus stops, put around the city, and they’re painting on them, “You are welcome here. Have a seat. We love you.”
While it’s one of the most frustrating things that’s ever happened in my time here in Nashville, [amid] increased surveillance and policing and hostility downtown, one of the most beautiful things I’ve experienced in my time in Nashville has come out of it. And that’s people just coming together to say, “If you’re not going to build us the kind of city we want to live in, we’re going to do it ourselves.”
What are you watching going into 2026?
I am watching this disconnect between our elected officials and the administration that exists around them and the people who actually live here. I’m wanting that to narrow.
I think that there’s a perception right now — as there has been the whole time that I’ve lived in this city — that nothing’s going to change. So, what’s the point, when it comes to your average resident thinking about talking to their elected officials.
But I also think that there is this growing vibe — and not just specific to Nashville, also at the state level and certainly at the federal level of, “We know what’s best. Stop complaining. You’re just trying to be difficult. We’re doing what’s best for you, can’t you see that?” And instead of saying, “Okay, I hear you, and some of your concerns are valid, and let’s have a conversation about how we can collaborate and work together,” [the response] just ends up being, for lack of a better phrase, “That’s fake news.”
I don’t think that any city or any community can grow together and build a place that works for all of us, if the side that’s in power is constantly telling the side that’s not in power that they don’t know what they’re talking about, and they’re wrong.
What I would hope for 2026 is that Nashville and its leaders will continue to find a way to bridge that gap. To be completely honest, that’s going to have to come from the leadership side because we as people don’t have the power to write a memorandum of understanding or communicate with the Speaker of the Tennessee House or make decisions about a giant, a billionaire’s business coming in to dig tunnels that might collapse without asking anybody if we even wanted the tunnels in the first place, right? We don’t necessarily have the power to drive those conversations.
The people who are in power and who are allowing those things or encouraging those things, or maybe just not pushing back enough against those things, have got to get better at coming into community and not just saying, “Sure, yeah, we hear you.” But actually say, “Let’s find a way to work together and make this right.”