Radical Hospitality + Trinity’s way forward
This is a long post. Thanks in advance for reading. I want to share a story of radical hospitality from our community & a vision for Trinity’s way forward.
This vision is mostly based on what I've learned from community members over the last 8 years as a neighbor, 4 years as a volunteer under founder Nate Paulk, 6 months as executive director, and countless conversations with deeply caring and thoughtful neighbors. Trinity is a space stewarded by and for the good of all neighbors, so what we do should reflect the needs, hopes, and desires of the community. I hope this vision captures well what I’ve heard & learned from our neighbors.
Radical Hospitality
We talk about showing radical hospitality a lot - it’s our core value. There are a thousand ways to show hospitality. I'm sharing one story of hospitality from our community at Trinity because it's right at the heart of what we do and why we do it. And I think it points us towards Trinity's future.
Last week, around 370 neighbors filled Nashville’s Cold Weather Overflow shelter each night as temps stayed below freezing all week. Many more neighbors stayed at the Nashville Rescue Mission, Room in the Inn, City Road Chapel, LaunchPad, and other churches & shelters. Outreach teams from Metro Nashville, Salvation Army, The Beat, Open Table Nashville & more canvassed the city to bring relief to neighbors and bring neighbors to shelter. We live in a great city with fantastic, deeply caring neighbors.
Side note: Judith Tackett wrote a fantastic breakdown of how Nashville spends $50M to reduce homelessness, absolutely worth a read. “2,129 people were counted as experiencing homelessness on one night in January of 2023, an increase of 11 percent. Of those, 28 percent were unsheltered.”
From Stranger to Neighbor, and from Neighbor to Family
Some of the neighbors in our community at Trinity Commons are unhoused. These are individuals full of worth and potential. They play a valuable role in this community, and we're not complete without them. Trinity’s community provided hot meals, warm clothes, and other supplies leading up to and during the freeze. We gave rides to cold weather shelters. Some neighbors staying in tents & abandoned houses nearby came to Trinity during the day to warm up & cook food.
One couple in our community took one of our unhoused neighbors in for the week: hosted him in their home, included him in meals, drove him to work. When he got sick, they took him to urgent care & paid his medical bills. The Trinity community was able to reimburse them with funds from our farmers market (thanks for shopping locally!)
These neighbors used to be strangers to each other. They became friends through community dinners, serving, eating, and cleaning together. And now they’ve become just a little more like family, welcoming the other into the safety of their home during the bitterest cold we’ve seen in years. These aren't the first Trinity neighbors to welcome an unhoused neighbor into their home after meeting through the community meal, and I hope they're not the last.
This is radical hospitality: welcoming & loving the stranger until we all belong. Nothing makes me prouder to be a part of this community than stories like this.
The need
I am so grateful that our city has programs and organizations dedicated to canvassing & staffing shelters in the winter. But I’m grieved that this is even necessary in a city this wealthy. 370 people desperate to get out of the cold is a lot, and it’s also not a huge number. We could build that many rooms in Nashville & more. We’re great at building! Look at all the cranes.
Judith Tackett wrote a fantastic breakdown of how Nashville spends $50M to reduce homelessness, absolutely worth a read. “2,129 people were counted as experiencing homelessness on one night in January of 2023, an increase of 11 percent. Of those, 28 percent were unsheltered.”
Nashville's Affordable Housing Task Force estimates that Nashville must add over 53,000 new housing units by 2030. Of these, 18,000 would need to be affordable for households earning below 80 percent of the area median income, or up to $79,850 for a family of four in 2023. Two huge barriers: land availability & zoning. The Urban Institute found that faith based organizations, hospitals, and academic institutions have a bunch of underutilized & developable land. So they’re saying there’s a chance.
Not only do we not have enough places for people to live, but we also don’t have spaces to get to know our low income and unhoused neighbors as friends, as equals, as brothers and sisters.
Trinity is that space today - we welcome and connect all neighbors so that whole communities can form and support each other, not just communities of wealth or communities of poverty.
Looking ahead
In the future, Trinity needs to grow from a space where neighbors connect (over meals, markets, and other community events) to include spaces to do meaningful, life giving work and to live in community as well. Many of our most vulnerable neighbors have already been displaced by people like me moving in. Zoning codes have contributed to displacement, prevented the kind of dense, mixed income housing that would have kept Nashville truly welcoming for all people. We can't go back and change that, but we can do our part to show radical hospitality to neighbors who aren't able to find a home or a community in Nashville.
I believe it's crucial for Trinity to offer space to do all three of these things - connect, live, and work - in one place. Nothing affirms someones potential more that using their own skills to do good honest work that contributes to the well being of others. And nothing says “you’re valued” more than creating space to live and be together. I want us to do more than remember your name at dinner & tell you we want you here. I want us to actually build places for the most vulnerable to live and thrive, so that they are literally welcomed here at Trinity and in our neighborhood.
If we don't offer meaningful opportunities for neighbors to live and work, our most vulnerable neighbors will continue to be driven out of their neighborhood. I’ve personally seen this happen too many times over the last 8 years living in East Nashville. We'll continue to live divided, less whole lives: the rich over here, the poor somewhere over there. We live in a city built to separate and isolate us from each other with roads and codes and laws. I'm long term hopeful that this can change. But we shouldn't wait. Trinity can build a community space where all people are shown radical hospitality & integrated in the social & economic life of the community.
Reasons to believe
Building this future - a fuller, richer, more welcoming Community Commons where a diverse range of neighbors live, work, and connect across economic lines - will take a long time. Nate Paulk & countless neighbors built the community, culture, and values necessary for a solid foundation. Yes, it's messy and complicated to co-locate all these different things in one space. But I'm convinced it's the best way to build for the future we long to see: one where all people belong.
Here are a few specific reasons to believe this future is both possible & desirable, even if it’s not inevitable:
Political: We have the most pro-housing, pro-transit Mayor I’ve seen in Nashville. Freddie O’Connell campaigned and won on this core message: “I want you to stay.” I’m personally more hopeful than I’ve ever been, even while acknowledging a ton of very real barriers.
Ecological: resilient ecosystems thrive in diversity & generate abundant life; monocrops struggle & extract more resources than they produce. Every plant plays a range of important & unique roles in the health of the ecosystem. Nothing gets wasted. We should build out Trinity & our communities more like nature: dense, diverse, alive, layered, lush. A neighborhood with only one type of house and one class of neighbor just won’t be as alive, interesting, or healthy as a neighborhood with a diversity of housing and people.
Religious: embrace YIGBY-ism (“Yes In God’s Backyard”). I believe in a God of love, who cares for the poor, who puts the lonely in families, who is looking for partners to do justice and mercy, to seek the good of the city. Loving our neighbors can look like building places to live so neighbors can stay in community.
We’re not even close to the first to think of doing this - other public and religious spaces have already converted their land and buildings to places for people to live & work in community. And historically, places to live, work, and play always used to be much closer. In many ways, we’re just returning to old and good ideas that have worked well in the past and in many other places.
The Power of Proximity
Brian Stephenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, talks about why it's important for us to get close to our neighbors in need, rather than simply displacing & then supporting them with aid from afar:
“I spend a lot of time with people who live in the margins of our society, I spend a lot of time with the poor. And I'm persuaded that there is more we can do to create a healthier environment, a more just society... The first thing I am persuaded we have to do is that if you want to do justice, if you want to love mercy, you've got to get proximate to the places and the people where injustice is made known.
You cannot stay in safe places, you cannot stay in comfortable places. I believe we are called to get proximate to the places in our community where there's poverty and suffering and abuse and neglect. I think there's power in proximity. You don't have to have all the answers or the solutions, but you've got to be willing to get closer to the places where there's inequality.”
How do you spend your time, and who do you spend it with? Who do you share a table with at dinner? Are you getting proximate to people with power and influence, or to those who are suffering and neglected? It’s not all or nothing of course. I’m convinced there are lots of little things we can do throughout our days to get closer to those in need. We don’t need to have all the answers. But we do need to look, and listen, and see our neighbors in need. We need our hearts to be broken! We’ll probably realize we have more money and resources than we need, that our time & gifts are meant for someone else.
If we want to build a more just future, where the worth & potential of all people is recognized, we need to continue to build and cultivate spaces that bring all kinds of neighbors together as equals. Here in our neighborhood around Trinity, and in every neighborhood in Nashville.
The couple in our community who welcomed our unhoused neighbor don’t have experience with homelessness or navigating housing & healthcare resources in Nashville. But they got proximate to their neighbors experiencing injustice, and when Nashville got cold, their hearts broke for their neighbor. They called their friend, offered their home, picked him up, and took him in.
This is radical hospitality, justice, and mercy.
Tragically optimistic, defiantly hopeful
I hope that by sharing the future I & others see Trinity Community Commons growing towards, we can have more grounded conversations about how to get there together. For starters, we still need to restore parts of our building that were damaged in a fire years ago. With a little creativity & great partners, can unlock spaces for the community to make music, make great products, provide services neighbors need, to celebrate, worship, and grieve together. More details on these near term plans coming soon!
Grateful that we get to build a community that welcomes all together,
Zach
