Nashville Ends Program For Struggling Fathers, But Not For Lack Of Funds

Metro’s Health Department ran the New Life Program for struggling fathers for three years.

Metro health officials have decided to end a program aimed at helping mostly low-income fathers. Officials say they’re nixing the effort because they couldn’t reach as many dads as they had hoped.

For the past three years, the New Life Fatherhood program has subsidized jobs for dads who couldn’t land full-time work, taught ways to better communicate with children, and it helped fathers peacefully resolve disputes with their spouses.

Travis Baird took the free classes. At the time, he was going through a custody battle, and he learned things like: “How to deal with the mother of a child” and learned how to have “an interaction that’s productive and positive.”

Yet Brian Todd with Metro’s Health Department said the program yielded disappointing results. In the past year, they enrolled around 160 dads, well under their goal of 500. So in that year, which was funded by a $1.5 million grant, Metro spent some $9,000 of federal funding per father with the program’s seven full-time staffers.

“We wish that we could have reached the 500 we wanted to reach,” Todd said. “It was granted to serve that population, and we fell short.”

Todd said federal officials placed the program under special oversight after questions over how the program was spending its grant money, and specifically, Todd said, that Metro Health wasn’t using the full grant allocation. After a corrective plan was put in place, the oversight was lifted.

“We recognize that it’s a complex social program with some highly challenging case management,” Todd said. “In the end, it’s just not a good fit for the health department.”

The program ran advertisements, partnered with non-profit groups, and worked with juvenile court officials to find fathers who could benefit from the training — but it all wasn’t enough to bring in as many fathers as they had hoped.

In all, the federal government dedicated $4.5 million to the program, and in September it will officially end.