Help people off the street and into real apartments where we can provide medical care, addiction treatment, and counseling they need right to their door - saving money in the process
About 1,500 to 1,900 Tennesseans are chronically homeless, cycling through emergency rooms, jails, and shelters at $20,000 to $40,000 per person per year with zero housing outcome.
Through Housing First we'll build permanent supportive housing with scattered-site apartments, standard leases, no sobriety preconditions, and wraparound services for as long as they're needed. A multi-site randomized trial with over 2,000 participants found 73% housing stability at 12 months, with 69% of costs offset by reduced emergency spending. As participants stabilize, they transition to standard vouchers, cutting per-person cost by more than half.
Nashville already operates on Housing First principles. We'll connect existing programs statewide and redirect federal and Medicaid dollars from less effective interventions into permanent housing. No new state appropriation required.
Get addiction treatment into every county and put the overdose-reversal drug naloxone in every pharmacy, fire station, and school.
Tennessee loses ten people a day to drug overdoses. Only 5.6% of the roughly 70,000 Tennesseans with opioid addiction receive medication-assisted treatment. Only 15 of 95 counties have even one treatment program.
We'll expand medication-assisted treatment to every county using Vermont's hub-and-spoke model, routing patients from local clinics to regional treatment centers. Naloxone, the overdose reversal drug, will be freely available at every pharmacy, fire station, and school. Every dollar spent on naloxone distribution returns $2,742 in cost savings. We'll also crack down on pill mills and invest in recovery-to-work programs that give people a real path back to productive life, because every person pulled back from addiction is a parent who comes home, a worker who shows up, or a neighbor who contributes.
Hire mental health clinicians for understaffed community centers, expand 24/7 mobile crisis response to every county, and open three crisis stabilization centers in Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville.
Tennessee ranks 44th nationally for mental health, with only 52 mental health workers per 10,000 residents. Nearly two-thirds of youth with major depression receive no treatment. Ninety-five percent of counties carry mental health shortage designations.
We'll add approximately 160 clinical positions to the state's community mental health center network: psychiatrists, social workers, nurse practitioners, and peer recovery specialists. Three new crisis stabilization units in Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville will give people in psychiatric crisis a step-down alternative to the emergency room. Mobile crisis teams will expand to full 24/7 statewide coverage, including rural satellite teams where response times lag most. And we'll fund a loan-repayment pipeline for clinicians who commit to crisis roles makes sure we can staff what we build.
Put trauma-informed training, peer support, and wellness services in every Tennessee police department, so officers don't break under the weight of the worst calls.
Officers experience PTSD and depression at roughly five times the rate of the general population. In recent years, more officers have died by suicide than in the line of duty. Nearly a quarter report suicidal ideation over their careers, yet fewer than one in five with mental health conditions seek treatment.
Trauma-informed training equips officers to manage their own occupational trauma and respond thoughtfully to trauma in the communities they serve. Nashville's Behavioral Health Services division is already doing this work. We'll put it in every department, at every rank, with peer support programs and confidential wellness services that officers can access without stigma.
Smaller class sizes, more counselors and special education aides, and retention bonuses for teachers at the schools that need them most.
In 2025, Tennessee surveyed 42,000 educators about their needs. The top answer wasn't pay. It was working conditions: planning time, discipline support, and class sizes.
We'll repeal the Education Freedom Scholarship program and redirect $144 million a year into public schools. Combined with $200 million from the Future Families Fund, we'll pay for behavioral health specialists to bring counselor ratios to national standards, enforce class size caps by hiring more teachers, paraprofessionals for every self-contained special education classroom, and pay retention stipends at the schools that need them most. The package starts at the 108 lowest-performing schools and expands only after independent evaluation proves it works.
Make sure every Tennessee mother survives childbirth, with doulas, group prenatal care, addiction treatment, and telehealth in rural counties.
Pregnancy-related deaths in Tennessee more than doubled between 2019 and 2021. The state's own Maternal Mortality Review Committee says 76% were preventable, and the system is even harsher for Black women who die at roughly 2.5 times the rate of white women. Roughly a third of deaths happen weeks to months after delivery, when the healthcare system has reduced support for mothers.
We need to solve this end-to-end. We'll cover doulas through Medicaid, where a systematic review of 27 trials found continuous support reduces cesarean deliveries by roughly 25%. We'll expand group prenatal care, and co-locate addiction treatment with prenatal care so no mother has to choose between getting help and keeping her child.
Send a behavioral health professional to every mental health crisis call, by funding city co-responder and alternative-response teams and stationing clinicians in 911 dispatch.
Memphis invented Crisis Intervention Team training in 1988. Nashville runs co-responder and fire-based behavioral health programs through Partners in Care. Knoxville's co-responder teams resolve 97% of calls without arrest. These programs work but none of them are fully staffed or funded for expansion.
We'll expand crisis response through competitive matching grants. Cities choose their model: co-responder, alternative response, or hybrid. Behavioral health clinicians stationed in metro 911 dispatch centers will screen incoming calls and divert behavioral health crises to crisis teams instead of patrol officers.
Far from defunding police, this frees officers to focus on real crime instead of spending half their shift on calls they aren't equipped for.
