Tennessee Solidarity Network for Housing and Homelessness
The TN Solidarity Network for Housing and Homelessness connects Tennesseans who are committed to creating a state where everyone has safe, dignified, and accessible housing and where no one is criminalized for living outdoors. We travel across the state to build relationships, provide support for grassroots campaigns, and speak at conferences and community roundtables. We co-host statewide housing policy Zooms every month for community members who are interested in advancing proactive legislation in Tennessee. We also co-host an annual Day on the Hill for Housing and Homelessness with our partners at TN4SafeHomes and other organizations.
The Solidarity Network is working with key partners to build infrastructure for a statewide coalition on housing, homelessness, and tenants’ rights. Both the Solidarity Network and the budding coalition we’re creating focus on sharing resources, offering mutual support, and creating policy change and systemic transformation across Tennessee.
If you’d like to get more involved, you can sign up for our newsletter below or (how can they sign up for monthly policy meetings?). You can also help us monitor the criminalization of homelessness across Tennessee by documenting citations, arrests, threats of arrest, or misconduct by law enforcement towards anyone experiencing homelessness through our Criminalization Documentation Form.
The Solidarity Network was created in March of 2022 in direct response to the passage of Tennessee’s “anti-camping law” – TN Public Law 986 amending TCA Sec. 39-14-414. This law went into effect on July 1, 2022 and makes camping on public property across the state a class E felony, punishable by up to six years in jail, a $3,000 fine, and the loss of voting rights. This is the harshest anti-camping law in the nation. The 2022 version of the law an existing law–the Equal Access to Public Property Act of 2012–that was initially passed and expanded in response to democratic uprisings on state property like Occupy Nashville in 2012 and the 2020 racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd and others.