About

On September 10, 2009, Mayor Karl Dean pledged that Nashville would help the country achieve the goals of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act by joining Mayor Bloomberg to launch the Cities of Service coalition. B y signing the Declaration of Service, Mayor Dean promised to do his part through the development of a comprehensive local action plan to increase civic engagement. This plan builds upon the energy and experience of local organizations that effectively utilize volunteers to address our city’s greatest needs.

Nashville’s comprehensive strategic plan, entitled “Impact Nashville”, seeks to leverage local human, institutional, and cultural capital through impactful volunteerism directed towards two of the mayor’s top priorities: Public education and the environment.
With measurable outcomes in each of these areas and with Impact Nashville promoting service as a core community responsibility, the standards of volunteerism across the public and private sectors will be further raised.

Improving public education is Mayor Dean’s top priority. This priority is shared across the county. Given the high level of community support and interest, Impact Nashville will utilize volunteers as an additional hands-on resource for the city’s highest need public schools. In recent years, Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) has seen a concerning decline in third grade reading scores. Third grade is a pivotal year for children to move from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”. For this reason, Impact Nashville is focusing on students with below proficient reading scores that attend the city’s lowest performing schools. In these schools, Impact Nashville will design one-on-one volunteer reading projects with kindergarten, first and second graders who are in the 25-50% quartile of their classmates.

In addition to in-school learning, Impact Nashville will also address out-of-school learning. A youth afterschool mentor program will be created to match high school reading mentors with high-need middle school students participating in one of the Mayor’s Nashville Afterschool Zone Alliance (NAZA) programs. To further benefit both the mentor and mentee, collegiate students will be engaged as mentors and leaders. This three-tiered approach will work to reduce middle and high school student absences and in classroom behavioral problems while strengthening self-motivation, confidence, and general attitudes toward education and their future. The long-term plan for this initiative is to first pilot the mentor project in one NAZA zone then expand into all MNPS seven clusters over the next five years.

A second top priority for Mayor Dean is the environment. Nashville’s historic 2010 flood brought devastation to our citizens, our infrastructure, and our environment. The flood highlighted pressing environmental concerns that Nashville needs to more aggressively address such as stormwater management. As part of Nashville’s flood recovery operations, city officials are working on ways to mitigate potential damage from future floods by identifying ways water can be better dispersed and absorbed naturally. Volunteers will plant trees and rain gardens in flood-affected areas to help absorb and manage stormwater. It is the Mayor’s hope that over time, these communities will have a stronger natural absorption system in place…planted and managed by volunteers.

In addition to the residential and business damages, the May 2010 flood left debris in and along our natural infrastructure. As a responsible community to our citizens, our environment, and our neighboring counties and states, Nashville will repair our waterways to their natural, and even cleaner, state prior to the flood. Impact Nashville will utilize volunteers to clean the debris left in and around our streams, creeks, and rivers. Teams of trained volunteers will remove the attainable debris and design a collaborative system for our citizens to take ownership of our waterways and ensure they remain clean.

While the flood brought many challenges to Nashville, opportunities have emerged. One of those opportunities is to reduce the city’s carbon footprint by integrating energy efficiency into our residential properties. In partnership with the Mayor’s Office of
Environment and Sustainability, Impact Nashville will address this goal in two ways. First, Impact Nashville will utilize volunteers to work one-on-one with flood victims in the re-build process to educate homeowners about energy efficiency, best practices, and impactful behavioral changes. Once the needs of flooded homes have been met, Impact Nashville will utilize this same strategy in lower income neighborhoods across the city. Second, through an incentive program, trained volunteers will educate and register homeowners to integrate energy efficiency and behavioral changes into their homes and lives.

To increase visibility and accessibility, Impact Nashville will develop a website to highlight the city’s priority volunteer projects. In addition, Impact Nashville will develop a curriculum to train agencies that work with volunteers on how to be innovative in project design and how to track and measure impact. To further solidify the Mayor’s reliance on volunteers to help accomplish citywide goals, critical partnerships will be developed and maintained. Impact Nashville will work closely with a variety of local nonprofits, community groups, businesses, and advocates to help shape, promote, implement, and champion the objectives of Impact Nashville.