Celebrating the Wins, Organizing for More: A recap of the 2024 Nashville Solidarity Budget Campaign – and an invitation to keep building with us
(Posted June 19, 2024)
Summary
Today, we are celebrating the passage of the FY25 Metro Nashville Operating Budget that makes critical investments in city workers and public school teachers, youth safety and restorative justice, affordable housing, indigent defense, non-police crisis response, and more. As we celebrate, however, we are also keeping our eyes on the prize of an even safer and more just Nashville built on significantly scaled up investments in public goods and non-police community safety initiatives, investments we can only achieve through radically democratized city budgeting and governance processes.
Building on the momentum of this year’s wins, we are preparing our next steps in the long haul work of building the kind of safety and wellbeing that our hyper-funding of cops, courts, and cages never will. We hope you will help shape our next year of organizing to win the Nashville we deserve by registering for our July 11, 2024 General Interest + Open Member Meeting where we will share about ways to get plugged in with the critical, joyous, and life-sustaining work ahead!
Wins
On June 18, 2024, Metro Council passed an Operating Budget for Fiscal year 2025 that allocates (partial) funding for more than half of the investments outlined in our Solidarity Budget platform.
Metro Nashville’s FY25 Operating Budget allocates public funds for:
- A 4% cost of living adjustment for city workers and teachers (up from the mayor’s recommended 3.5% but short of SEIU’s 5% ask)
- $1 million for the Southern Movement Committee’s Varsity Spending Plan ($750,000 for a new Office of Youth Safety and $250,000 to Parks to expand programming for youth – an incredible win even if short of the $10 million requested)
- $30 million for the Barnes Affordable Housing Trust Fund (an important but highly imperfect avenue for funding affordable housing – a stop-gap until we develop a robust campaign for non-market-based alternatives)
- $400,000 to launch the Indigent Defense and Excellence in Advocacy (IDEA) pilot (almost half of the $880,000 requested)
In addition, the new budget increases funding for the REACH non-police mental health crisis response program, which allows it to expand to nights and weekends.
Our Solidarity Budget platform also lifted up Arts Equity’s aspiration to raise funding for the arts to 1% of the budget. The FY25 budget funds a $400,000 equity study.
The Solidarity Budget demand, brought by Mask4Mask Nashville, for funding for COVID safety measures including masks, rapid tests, and air purifiers to be distributed through community centers and libraries was not funded, but Budget & Finance Chair Delishia Porterfield says she is “looking into this” for the future.
We celebrate the funding allocated for a safer and more just Nashville, and we applaud the people and organizations that organized to make them possible, particularly SEIU Local 205, public school teachers, and the Southern Movement Committee. We are proud to have contributed our energies to these organizations’ campaigns this budget cycle. We also recognize Council Member Delishia Porterfield’s work in developing a substitute budget that funds these important investments.
Room for Improvement
Our 2024 Nashville Solidarity Budget outlined in great detail a case for improving public safety by divesting up to $15 million from MNPD – a lowball estimate of the funds MNPD holds for its perpetually unfilled positions – as well as by rerouting the mayor’s recommended $1.2 million for tasers to help fund items from the Solidarity Budget. We argued that our city should value real-life city workers and public goods more than imaginary police and tasers that will sit on a shelf for the foreseeable future.
We learned in early June that Mayor O’Connell’s recommended budget – and the substitute budget that ultimately passed – already drew excess funds from departments, including $4.2 million from MNPD’s vacancies, to reach targeted savings and balance the budget. This means that this year’s budget quietly divested $4.2 million from MNPD in order to fund critical investments, including a cost of living adjustment for city workers and teachers. We celebrate this quiet divestment while also recognizing that Metro Finance and the Mayor’s Office intend to restore – and likely add to – those funds for police during the next budget cycle.
In the end, the FY25 operating budget includes funding for MNPD’s tasers that will sit on a shelf or be rendered superfluous by the funding of upgraded tasers, and otherwise maintains police funding for the vast majority of unfilled positions, funds that MNPD says that it regularly uses for other purposes, including massive overtime costs, and more.
Demanding and Organizing for More
While we celebrate this budget cycle’s wins – critical investments and quiet divestments alike – we remain clear about the life-and-death imperative to make Nashville truly safer for all of us by beginning to reduce the size and scope of policing in Nashville, which is necessary to fully fund the public goods and non-police community safety interventions that we need for our collective safety and wellbeing. To do this, we must:
- Organize residents to practice and build infrastructure for truly participatory budgeting and governance that would build the people power necessary to…
- Radically expand community safety by transitioning portions of traditional “public safety” work from police to non-police entities, which requires…
- Redistributing public funds from policing, courts, and jails to (a) the public goods that improve people’s lives and thereby prevent crime and violence in ways that MNPD never will, and to (b) non-police crisis response, community safety, violence prevention, and restorative justice programs.
We know that the political will to enact these transformational shifts for the greater good at a greater scale in Nashville does not currently reside within the Mayor’s Office or Metro Council. These transitions to a new model of budgeting, governance, public safety, and wellbeing for all Nashvillians will only come to fruition if we engage, educate, and organize thousands of Nashvillians to build on the momentum of this budget cycle to generate a groundswell so irresistible that it cannot be stopped.
Join Us!
We are currently in the process of developing plans to build on this year’s campaign in new and exciting ways, and we want to invite you to join us in shaping and executing those plans to win even more next budget cycle and beyond!
If you want to learn more about how you can play a role in organizing for safety and abundance for all Nashvillians by building on this year’s important wins, join us on Thursday, July 11, for our General Interest + Open Member Meeting, where we will share ways to get plugged into our work. Register here.
MNPD’s latest crisis of legitimacy and its ongoing inability to recruit and retain officers signals an opportunity to turn from the dead-end path of doubling down on ineffective and harmful models of “public safety” that do little more than manage the outcomes of structural inequality. Instead, we have an opportunity to build on this budget cycle’s wins by pressing boldly toward radically scaling up more effective ways of preventing and responding to harm in our communities by building a Nashville in which all of us have what we need to thrive and be safe.
Register today for our July 11 General Interest Meeting!
In solidarity and hope,
Nashville People’s Budget Coalition
2024 Nashville Solidarity Budget
(Posted May 23, 2024)
The 2024 Nashville Solidarity Budget is a collaboration organized by the Nashville People’s Budget Coalition and endorsed by more than 20 Nashville social justice, advocacy, and human rights organizations.
The Solidarity Budget synthesizes the demands of multiple progressive organizations in Nashville with the initial results of the 2024 Nashville People’s Budget Survey. Combined, the demands that make up the 2024 Nashville Solidarity Budget represent the will of thousands of Nashville residents from every council district across Davidson County.
The 2024 Nashville Solidarity Budget does not aspire to present a complete balanced budget but instead weaves the interconnected demands of multiple organizations into one unified budget platform with a primary focus on expenditures.
Critics will say that there is simply no way every investment outlined below can be fulfilled, particularly in a “belt-tightening” revenue year. While it is unlikely that every expenditure below will be fully funded, we also reject the premise that the way the city budget is is the way the city budget must be – that residents must compete against one another for scraps every year. There is abundance in Nashville’s coffers, it’s just a matter of how our city is accustomed to allocating it.
The 2024 Nashville Solidarity Budget platform incorporates some but far from all components of a more just budget for all Nashvillians. To keep building a more just budget and budgeting process, we must democratize everything. We do not anticipate that Metro Nashville will democratize its budgeting and governance practices on its own, which is why we plan to continue – and expand – our own experiments in directly democratic decision-making and budgeting with even more Nashville residents and progressive organizations in the year ahead.
Endorsing Organizations
Nashville People’s Budget Coalition
Arts Equity Nashville
Mask4Mask Nashville
Choosing Justice Initiative
NAACP Nashville
Elmahaba Center
Nashville Peace and Justice Center
Open Table Nashville
Nashville Community Crisis Response
AbolitionWorks TN
Nour Nashville
Black Mental Health Village
Sunrise Movement Nashville
Party for Socialism & Liberation Nashville
Southerners on New Ground Nashville
Showing Up for Racial Justice Nashville
Palestine Hurra Collective
Nashville Jews for Justice
Nashville Musicians for Change
Tennessee Student Union
Indigenous People’s Coalition Nashville
Vanderbilt Alumni for Palestine
Melanin Speaking Nashville
Inhale Nashville
Southeast Center for Cooperative Development
Workers’ Dignity
Black Alliance for Peace Nashville*
Fill out this form to add your organization to the list.
* Black Alliance for Peace Nashville endorses the 2024 Nashville Solidarity Budget with the exception of the demand for $30 million for the Barnes Fund, believing, much like NPBC leadership does, that market-based housing development (what the Barnes Fund typically funds) will not provide the kind of permanently affordable housing that all Nashvillians and people everywhere deserve.
2024 Nashville Solidarity Budget Survey
(Posted April 19, 2024)
We are excited to share the 2024 Nashville People’s Budget Survey. All community-oriented residents of Nashville are invited to complete this brief 5 minute survey, available in English, Spanish, and Arabic. Responses will help develop a people’s budget platform that we will use to push for a more just and equitable city budget. Please share with your family, friends, and community!
If you would like to print and share fliers with a QR code in your neighborhood, at a protest, at a community event, at your business, at your favorite coffee shop, on community bulletin boards, at your place of worship, or anywhere, you can download our flier in multiple sizes and languages:
English (full-page)
English (4-per-page)
Spanish (full-page)
Spanish (4-per-page)
Arabic (full-page)
Arabic (4-per-page)
Share via social media from the following links:
Nashville People's Budget Coalition 