St. Luke's Community House, Nashville

On Friday, March 4, our urban ministry class visited two locations in Nashville, Church of the Holy Trinity and St. Luke's Community House.

The St. Luke's Community House is an Episcopal community center in West Nashville that provides meals, a food pantry, a place for individuals to meet with social workers and case managers, a day camp, scouting troops, income tax assistance, English classes for immigrants, and much, much more. The place is essentially a one-stop shop for community needs in this low-income area, and has been part of this community since 1913, and physically located in the same area since 1920.

The food pantry at St. Luke's

The Community House was founded in 1913 by a group of women who were all members of the Episcopal women's order Daughters of the King, from different parishes in the diocese. The original need was to provide a place for women and children to stay and receive meals and medical attention while visiting men incarcerated in the nearby prison. Today it has blossomed into so much more, but the one constant service that has been provided by St. Luke's since its inception in 1913 is childcare. St. Luke's now houses a state-of-the-art preschool that is an official United Way preschool center and uses the "Read to Succeed" curriculum that is standard in United Way preschools to get the children ready to enter kindergarten in the area public schools.

On March 4, our class met with St. Luke's Executive Director Brian Diller, who gave us an overview of the center's programs. He told us that the preschool is particularly important in this neighborhood: the zip code where St. Luke's is located -- 37209 -- has a 40 percent high school drop-out rate, and the two lowest-performing high schools in the state are located in that area. The extra attention and quality education that the children at St. Luke's receive before they ever even enter the public school systems helps to increase their chances of success once they get there.

A St. Luke's staff member gives our class a tour of the preschool.

Brian told us that 46 percent of the children in the preschool come from "very diverse backgrounds," by which I assume he meant either immigrant or recent immigrant families. He listed Vietnamese, Mexican, Latin American, and Eastern European (Croatian) as some of the ethnic backgrounds of the students at the preschool. Vietnamese are a particularly large population at St. Luke's; West Nashville is an center of Vietnamese refugee resettlement. The Vietnamese population is so large in this area that the library at St. Luke's preschool provides books in Vietnamese in addition to English and Spanish.

Bumper sticker seen on a car in St. Luke's parking lot

But the majority of our time with Brian was spent talking about the flood in Nashville last May (2010). Still recent history for the people of this neighborhood, which was one of the hardest hit in the flood, the memories were clearly fresh and poignant for Brian, who told story after story about how the community came together in the wake of the flood to provide for the needs of the neighborhood. As I listened to Brian, I was reminded of stories of disaster relief in New York post-9/11, or in New Orleans post-Katrina. The story of the community coming together in the midst of crisis was the same here as it was in those other places. St. Luke's itself was turned into a triage center for six weeks or so after the flood, and a local restaurant donated three meals a day for weeks at no charge to guests at the center. Because St. Luke's was such a well-known name in the community, it was a natural central gathering place for people to come to in the midst of a tragedy. It was a real testimony to the benefits of building long-term, proactive relationships with a community so that the structures needed for crisis response are in place when they are needed.