Cookeville Community Cares is urgently seeking donations of four-person tents to replace damaged shelters for individuals experiencing homelessness in the Upper Cumberland.
Board Member Lisa Carver said the coalition uses the shelters to assist unhoused neighbors while working to remove barriers to permanent housing. The organization specifically requests four-person models to maximize available space while ensuring the accommodations remain temporary.
“We want to provide some shelter for a short term while we aim to help the people that we serve with some of the barriers that they face,” Carver said, “Like if they need help getting legal documents like IDs or a license or they need help with some part of maybe traumatic event or maybe they lost their house and they need help with an area like that in their life, but we don’t want to make them too comfortable, so we don’t want to have a huge tent that has room to stand up in and room to put some kind of furniture in or we don’t want them to get too comfortable because we’re meant to be a stepping stone, not a landing pad.”
Carver said the coalition creates an individualized pathway plan for each person staying at the shelter to help restore them to society. The organization is also seeking mentors to sit with individuals and assist them in obtaining required documents for job and housing applications.
“I would just like to ask that as you see people experiencing homelessness, try to really see them just as a person and realize that they are all God’s creation and His handiwork,” Carver said. “And if we would have compassion towards them instead of maybe overlook them, I think that so much in our community would change.”
Carver said standard camping tents are designed for short weekend trips and deteriorate quickly when used as prolonged housing. Recent high winds, snow, and rain have caused significant damage to the current supply, resulting in torn fabric and broken zippers from daily use.
“The people that we serve with Cookeville Community Cares that do live in these tents are extremely grateful because otherwise they would just be sleeping on the ground with no shelter at all,” Carver said. “But many of our tents are damaged right now because they’ve been out there for a long time and they’ve served many people and so we just need to replace the ones that are damaged and have holes and tears and rips.”
Carver said the ongoing need for shelter stems from a local lack of affordable housing and lingering economic impacts from the 2020 pandemic. Job losses created a domino effect that led to increased rates of addiction, trauma, and mental illness.
“A lot of people that maybe get arrested and re-offend right now, they don’t necessarily need jail but they need help with mental illness and so that’s a huge area that we lack as a society, we lack help with mental illness right now,” Carver said. “And so that’s one reason that we see the need continuing even to increase.”
Carver said residents can drop off new tents at the back of the church located at 502 Gould Drive in Cookeville or make monetary donations through the Cookeville Community Cares Facebook page.