Mission

The Nashville People’s Budget Coalition is a member-led organization that educates and organizes to create safe and thriving communities for all by reducing the scope and power of policing, increasing investment in life-giving public goods, and radically democratizing municipal budgeting and governance.

Principles

Our core guiding principles are anti-capitalism and abolition. In 2025, our membership will update and elaborate upon our original “Principles & Values” that we developed in 2019 to reflect the evolution of our work and the grounded perspective of our current membership.

History

The Nashville People’s Budget Coalition (NPBC) formed in 2019 as a coalition of organizations gathered to organize for a Nashville that fosters safe and thriving communities through fully-funded and community controlled public goods and non-police crisis response. The organizations that joined the coalition in 2019 or in 2020 included: Black Lives Matter Nashville; Free Hearts; Gideon’s Army; Middle Tennessee Democratic Socialists of America; Music City Riders United; No Exceptions Prison Collective; Open Table Nashville; People’s Alliance for Transit, Housing, and Equity; Safer Schools Nashville; Southerners on New Ground Nashville (SONG Nashville); and Workers’ Dignity.

After carrying out invest/divest campaigns during the 2020 and 2021 budget seasons, NPBC entered a period of rest and reflection, and eventually reconstitution: in 2022, after a shared process of discernment and organizational check-in, the Nashville People’s Budget Coalition transitioned from being primarily a coalition comprised of organizations to being an organization comprised of individual members, with the first members joining in early 2023. Three original members of the coalition’s ad hoc leadership group remained on, adding two others who had been proximate to our work to form a transitional steering committee that facilitated the work of building a new membership to keep the original work of the coalition alive year round, which the original coalition no longer had the capacity to do beginning in 2022. As we were building our new membership, we ran a light people’s budget campaign in 2023. We ran a successful Solidarity Budget campaign in 2024.

In 2025, more than 20 active members lead the Nashville People’s Budget Coalition through a rotating steering committee, a campaign coordination committee, a political education and comms committee, and a canvassing and assemblies committee.

Visit our 2025 Campaign page to learn more about what we’ve been up to this year.