The Nashville Food Project currently shares 80 meals a day with Community Care Fellowship — a new meal partner in 2020 — for the nonprofit’s lunch program, pre-school, and a program that temporarily provides hotel housing during COVID-19 to folks who have previously lived in encampments.
Community Care Fellowship has a long history in Nashville, and we are thrilled to be in partnership with these folks! We caught up with Executive Director Ryan LaSuer recently to hear more about their mission.
What particular challenges have you faced with COVID-19?
“The thing I love about Community Care Fellowship is we are so family-oriented and very relationship-oriented. Obviously in the South, hugs as greetings aren’t being done at the same click as prior to COVID,” he said, noting that the numbers of folks they’re able to have in the building has been reduced. While some meals are served indoors alongside other stabilizing services such as hygiene, laundry, mail services -- others are served as grab-and-go out the front door or at temporary hotel housing.
“There are a lot more logistics,” he said. “We’ve had to figure out how to have relationships in a different way and be sure we’re still hearing people and their stories.”
Many people know of Community Care Fellowship as Ken & Carol’s. Can you tell me a little more about that?
“If you ask anybody who’s in an encampment or on the streets about Community Care Fellowship, they will call it Ken and Carol’s, because Ken and Carol Powers were some of the original founders and because of the way they built relationships with our guests.”
Ryan says it was the hospitality of Ken and Carol that started the culture living on at Community Care Fellowship today.
“We originated downtown at McKendree United Methodist Church. It was in the early 80s, the beginning of individuals experiencing homelessness in Nashville. They used to serve lunch for the working class downtown. It goes back to food, right? Slowly but surely folks came in who couldn’t pay and community members would pay for individuals behind them. It wasn’t the church, it was the community—a neat point about how the community can problem-solve and be part of that solution.”
Image from Community Care Fellowship website.
By the late 80s, Community Care Fellowship had expanded services and moved to East Nashville. While stabilizing services were an early offering of the nonprofit, it also led to developmental services, which helps create pathways through employment and enterprises such as Unlocked, which encourage creativity and teaches women how to manufacture jewelry. CCF also offers pathways to permanent housing through our master lease with Urban Housing Solutions. .
“Toxic Charity is one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read. The main point of the book is what does it look like to empower versus enable?” he continued. “Our stabilizing services go back to Matthew 25: ‘I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me…’ That became the starting point of our stabilizing serves. But then we need to create pathways out. That’s the empower part.”
Learn more about Community Care Fellowship here.