Nashville needs to do more to help veterans who aren’t facing crisis, a city committee says

A special committee created to study Nashville’s services for veterans says the city is “veteran-friendly” but not necessarily “veteran-ready.”

That means the city has some resources in place, but not enough. The group also found that those resources focus mainly on people in crisis.

It laid out three recommendations to better support Nashville’s former service members:

• The committee says the city needs to create a new department that focuses on veterans, because services are now spread between multiple different agencies and community organizations.
• The group also wants to form a board of community members to work with that department.
• And they want the city and the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce to make the business sector more welcoming to veterans.

“To become Veteran-ready, Metro needs to be the hub centering, supporting, innovating and growing Veteran support efforts,” officials said in a press release.

To do that, officials suggested that Metro collaborate with the business community and Operation Stand Down Tennessee, an organization that houses the city’s Office of Veterans Services.

About 37,000 veterans live in Davidson County, according to the mayor’s office. The city’s current services for them include the Davidson County Veterans Treatment Court, which diverts those who are arrested into a program that offers mental healthcare and substance abuse treatment, rather than putting them behind bars. The city also provides incentives to landlords who rent to veterans experiencing homelessness and gives extra points to developers who apply for money from the Barnes Housing Trust Fund to build housing for veterans.

The committee says it’s talking to both the mayor and the Chamber of Commerce about next steps.