Trevecca staff helps create consortium of nonprofits to serve neighborhood

By Alayna Simons

Amid thousands of non-profits that exist within Nashville, the Love Thy Neighborhood Collective is working toward creating a community where non-profits can come together to converse and collaborate on actions that need to be made for the issues in the Napier Sudekum community.

“The Love Thy Neighborhood Collective exists to be a bridge to connect organizations and non-profits in 37210 to come together and do work for collective impact,” said Iris Gordon, co-founder of the collective and an adjunct professor at Trevecca Nazarene University.

The collective was talked about in 2019, but with the delay that the pandemic caused, the first meeting wasn’t until Sep. 2021.

Over 60 organizations, churches, schools, nonprofits, etc. are linked to this collective but not all are regularly represented at the quarterly luncheon meetings. The impact started larger with multiple cities and over time narrowed in and focused on the Napier and Sudekum area, intentionally fostering connection for the flourishing and renewal of the Murfreesboro pike corridor, according to Terri Neville, the co-founder of the collective.

A few of the non-profits that are regularly represented at the meetings are the Tennessee Justice Center, Rebecca’s House, and Harvest Hands, with multiple Trevecca alumni connected through and invited by Gordon.

Along with taking lead on the collective, Neville works as a civil trial attorney as a profession and was recruited to Trevecca by the Salvation Army to start the Social Justice Resource Center in partnership with Trevecca.

From there, Gordon and Neville took their connections and made the collective together.

“Instead of trying to talk to everybody about it, it was obvious where Trevecca campus is located, that we were right there in this area of so much unmet need, and we had this partnership around social justice,” said Neville. “I thought, well, why don’t we leverage some relational currency that we already have with the neighborhood, the nonprofits, and some of the churches, and just do what we’re constantly talking about. That’s how the collective was born.”

The people within the collective are all separated into “pillars” or “action groups” that work towards different issues or needs within the community.

The four pillars include health and wellness, youth development and education, food security, and jobs and economic development.

Twice a year, the collective works together to create a community event. This goal began after realizing that the impact on the community was greater when gathering all non-profits rather than remaining independent, according to Neville.

“We’re brainstorming together. We’re doing community events together. We’ll reach more neighbors. We’ll understand their needs better and provide what’s necessary for the empowerment and the flourishing of the neighborhood,” said Neville. “We’ve always said since day one that even though the collective is a lot of us who come into the community to help the community, that we had to keep focus at the center and have equal voice of the neighbors.”

Over the years, the collective has grown and the impact has been positive, but Neville states as a personal experience that only the building of trust with people over time is what will lead to further impact.

“We fully intend to be salt and light, but without understanding the lived experiences and giving the mic to the neighbors themselves, we’re not salt and light, we’re salt and wound. When we understand that, that’s when we really have to come sit. They see that we’re together and we’re not going anywhere. I think that’s what’s really making a difference now is building trust.”

Nicole Vaughn-Valentine, executive director of community relations at Napier Kitchen Table, who led the discussion on food security at the collectives last meeting in March, lives a block away from the Napier Sudekum housing and believes in strength in community.

“Being one block over I’m able to invite neighbors over to my backyard and we have fire pits,” said Vaughn-Valentine. “I’m also able to show up more quickly when there are some emergency. So this decision I made to live in the community was because I love being in community. Community is important.”

Key explained that the collective does not make decisions on issues or actions towards solving those issues until they go to the community first, talking with the people who have lived it.

“We just are trying to build this ecosystem of resources so that we could better serve the community together,” said Key. “So we really were able to deep dive and have conversations, knock on doors, and meet people and say ‘I want you to thrive, and I want you to be better, and I want you to have the abundant life that God has called for us.’”

Key would like to see more people join the committee who are ready to do the work and who are ready to be the next generation for the committee.

“I think sometimes when we’re in this nonprofit work and we are problem solvers and fixers,” said Key. “So when we do that, we miss the mark. We missed the calling that Jesus gave to us. He didn’t tell us that we needed to fix nothing. He told us to love our neighbors and then define what that is. Because even in the loving and the authentic relationships, we all have to have boundaries and then in an authentic relationship, being a neighbor, you have to have uncomfortable conversations that lead to change.”