Nashville Organized For Action And Hope (NOAH)

Nashville Organized For Action And Hope (NOAH) is an interfaith, multi‐racial organization uniting congregations, labor unions, and associations, engaging ordinary people in political and economic decisions affecting them. NOAH was founded to deal with Nashville’s growing inequality, concentrated in African‐American and immigrant communities. NOAH includes 64 congregations, labor unions, and organizations diverse in race, income, neighborhood, and faith tradition. NOAH trains ordinary citizens to participate in public debate around issues around affordable housing, economic opportunity, and criminal justice. Through advocacy, the agency seeks to improve health for Tennesseans by increasing local and state funding for mental health diversion from jail, expanding to other parts of the criminal justice system (including juvenile court) changing the probation system to accommodate mentally ill people who are unable to keep probation appointments, and creating “Crisis Intervention Teams” with police and mental health workers, based on the national model from Memphis.