History

In 1912, Nashville’s downtown businessmen sold a special edition of The Nashville Tennessean one Christmas Eve. Calling themselves the Big Brothers, these caring city leaders filled peach baskets with groceries and delivered them to the shanty towns that lined the Railroad Gulch and the Cumberland River.

Nashville is no longer gripped by the extreme poverty of those early years, when Big Brother Elmer Bryant reported delivering food to people “so hungry they were gnawing on bones”.

But in Music City today, many of our neighbors struggle to meet their most basic needs. And as the cost of housing rises rapidly, Nashville natives can no longer afford to live in the neighborhoods where they grew up. Working people are pushed into public housing because it is all that they can afford. Waiting lists for affordable housing grow long for our poorest neighbors, leaving families homeless, living in motels or doubled up in small apartments.