About

Nashville People’s Budget Coalition

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 has facilitated the work of building a new membership to keep the original work of the coalition alive month in and month out, year after year, which the original coalition no longer had the capacity to do beginning in 2022.

Today, NPBC’s steering committee and membership engage in political education and community organizing work that invite Nashville residents to envision and come together to realize a safe and abundant Nashville rooted in fully-funded and community-controlled public goods and non-police crisis response, not cops and cages.