We’re Back & We’re Building! Join Us!

Greetings comrades and friends!

After taking a year to rest and regroup, the Nashville People’s Budget Coalition is back and preparing to pick up where we left off: building people power to divest public funds from police, jails, and courts that neither keep us safe nor help us thrive, and to invest abundantly in the public goods like housing, education, transit, and non-police emergency response that do. 

The chorus of Nashville residents fed up with mass displacement, rising unaffordability, and leaders that continually place profits before people is growing louder and louder everyday. The time for business as usual is running out. 

We have some exciting opportunities coming soon for you and your neighbors to join and grow our work of building toward a new Nashville for all, starting in your own neighborhood and council district. We hope you will join us!

Our first event on the calendar will be a virtual book club to help nourish our imaginations for what’s possible and build our analytical and strategic toolbox for getting there. We’re reading the recently published book No More Police: A Case for Abolition by Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie. Our first gathering will be November 1, 6:30-7:30 p.m. Future meeting dates and times will be announced soon. 

Register for our November 1 virtual gathering here. 

If you are curious about or already eager to join the movement to build a world of safety and abundance without police, jails, and prisons in Nashville, we hope you will join us! 

A firm commitment to abolition is not required in order to attend! Reading the book is encouraged but not required. Attendance at all book club meetings is also not required. Come as you are and as you are able!

We look forward to discussing and learning together through this important and highly accessible book, which was written specifically with organizers and non-experts in mind.

Stay tuned for more updates and opportunities to join our work soon! Sign up for our email list here.

In solidarity,

Nashville People’s Budget Coalition

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2022 Update & Statement

The Nashville People’s Budget Coalition is currently in a period of rest and regrouping. It is exhausting for a small group of unpaid organizers to attempt to change a system that is actively committed to maintaining a violent status quo. 

Over the last two years, we have educated thousands on the budget and the vast spending disparities that comprise it, and have mobilized thousands of residents to engage in what is an otherwise undemocratic budgeting process. 

Despite the impacts we have made as a coalition, including some very small wins that we and other organizations helped secure in recent budget cycles, we know that the work is only just beginning. 

Nashville is more inequitable, unaffordable, inaccessible, and anti-Black than it has ever been. 

This year’s proposed FY23 budget largely offers more of the same: a few crumbs for the things we need most, and a steady, increasing, and outsized stream of funds for violent and ineffective responses (cops & cages) to problems created by decades of racial and economic inequality.

As we pause and regroup, it is more clear than ever that Nashville will never establish the safety and thriving that all its residents deserve until we give residents the power to determine how our public dollars are spent, and until we dramatically divest from what fails to keep us safe and invest in what does.

We dream of a Nashville that has learned that true public safety is built not on cops and cages, but on accessible, affordable, and community-controlled public goods and non-police means of community safety. 

We dream of a Nashville for all, not just a few. And we will continue bringing more and more residents across the city together to make that dream a reality.

Stay tuned as we continue building in the months to come!

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and sign up for our email list to stay involved.

In solidarity,

The Nashville People’s Budget Coalition

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The Fight Continues. And We Will Win.

On Tuesday night, Metro Council celebrated loads of cash for cops and a few crumbs for our communities with a standing ovation. 

Yes, the substitute budget that council passed makes important investments in education, including teacher and support staff pay, and minuscule investments in affordable housing, transit, and violence interruption. These items were only included in the budget at all because we have joined impacted community members in amplifying the desperate need for increased funding for these resources for years. 

But nearly 3,000 Nashville residents living in all council districts and zip codes have already told us that this is not even close to enough! The budget we deserve and demand is a budget that meets our communities’ needs by fully funding the public goods that enable us all to thrive. 

Instead, we have a budget that maintains the violent status quo by devoting millions more to cops and cages while our communities suffer from crises of poverty, displacement, and violence that cops and cages by definition cannot fix, and often make worse. 

It does not have to be this way.

And that is why we stood in solidarity with illegally evicted renters and brought Tuesday’s council meeting to a grinding halt. Fed up with council’s swift rejection of the only amendment that would have divested from police and invested in our young people, its disregard of the voices of thousands of constituents calling for serious change, and its self-congratulation for maintaining the violent status quo, we were left with no choice but to disrupt business as usual. 

While some are painting our disruption as disrespect, we know it was actually the closest thing to democracy that happened Tuesday night. When the budget process does not include historically excluded residents in any meaningful way, we have no choice but to involve ourselves, whether the process allows it or not. As a result, renters and members of our coalition have the attention of the city, and we will continue to force the life or death issues our people are facing until change comes.

City leaders may be relieved that they pushed through millions more for cops and cages and a few crumbs to satiate us. But it will not be possible to ignore the growing chorus of thousands of Nashvillians for much longer. Years of organizing to disrupt the violent status quo in Nashville has shown us that history is on the side of people fighting tooth and nail to survive systems that do not serve and protect us, and to build new systems in their place.

The fight continues. And we will win. 

Sign up for our mailing list to stay up to date on ways you can get involved in our work to come.

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