Five Years at the Table
Five years ago, I walked into an organization still learning the shape of its new home in the Nations. The Nashville Food Project had just moved into its headquarters when the world shut its doors. We celebrated our tenth anniversary over Zoom that year, with a musical guest performing to a city listening from their kitchen tables and living rooms. It should have felt strange. Instead it felt like a promise: that even scattered, we were still a table.
Not long after, we lost our founder, Tallu Schuyler Quinn. Grief does not organize itself around fiscal years. It shaped the seasons that followed more than any strategic plan could have. We grieved. We cooked. We planted. We kept going, because that is what a community that loves each other does.
The volunteers came back slowly, the way people do after a hard season, one Tuesday shift at a time. Five years later, our volunteer numbers are finally approaching where they once were. In the meantime, the need across our city grew, and so did our capacity to respond.
We grow more food. We share more meals. We reach more neighbors.
Our meals production has expanded well beyond what it was, including heart-healthy meals developed through the Nashville Wellness Collaborative’s Heart of Nashville initiative and more than nine thousand meals delivered directly to neighbors who cannot easily come to us. Through our new Food is Medicine program, ProduceRx, we are also connecting fresh produce with neighbors as part of their care, including through home delivery. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is meet someone at their door instead of asking them to find yours.
We rethought what it means to grow food in this city, too. The Community Agriculture Network and our community orchards program came out of that rethinking, along with partnerships with The Giving Grove and the Urban Garden Project. Our partnership with the Friends of Mill Ridge Park has also only deepened with time. What is unfolding in that park, in the southeast corner of Nashville, is not just a garden. It is an agrarian vision for what a neighborhood can grow into.
We have mapped hunger, too, alongside Meharry Medical College, tracing bus stop by bus stop across North Nashville how far a neighbor must travel to reach food, because you cannot steward what you have not first paid attention to. Justice begins with careful attention. So does good soil. That same evidence is already shaping how we work, not just what we advocate for. It is part of why you will now find our Community Markets set up at WeGo Central, meeting people where the buses already stop.
And we have moved from diagnosis toward action. For nearly a decade, this organization has helped name what is broken in Nashville's food system, including FeedBack Nashville in 2023 that engaged over 85 organizations and nearly 1,000 residents from every corner of the city. What that work made clear is not complicated to say, even if it is hard to do: Nashville knows its problems well. What the city has lacked is the dedicated capacity to turn that knowledge into policy. We are now working to build that capacity, carrying this work forward in Nashville and across Tennessee, on questions as practical as who can grow food on what land and as structural as how our state pays for produce as medicine.
None of this growth was inevitable. It was tended, year by year, meal by meal, relationship by relationship. The need in this city has grown. So has our capacity to meet it, not because we set out to become bigger, but because the table needed to make room for more.
Five years in, I am less interested in what we built than in what building it taught me: that hope is not a feeling you wait for. It is a garden you plant, a meal you cook, a door you knock on, again and again, until it becomes a habit, and then a community, and then, if you are patient, a home.
