Annual Report
Annual Report of the Chair
2024-2025
The annual summary of our progress is one the one hand great news of our achievements and on the other, we now know the magnitude of our challenges. As an organization, we are within the Coalition of partners in the 8 county Appalachian Regional Coalition on Homelessness (ARCH) of East Tennessee. We are recognized as the lead in our county for the annual Point-In-Time count of the homeless on the designated night in January. We are thus helping add our view of this problem to the state’s total and eventually to the national assessment underpinning the national ‘snapshot’ of those who are unhoused. We have competed for grants within the Continuum of Care (CoC) for Emergency Services funding as well as other opportunities to assist with housing support. The Board of Directors has taken a self-imposed crash course in grant writing to seek funding to aid and continue our mission. We are a small fish in our local pond competing against established and previously funded groups. Perhaps equally important has been the liasons formed with several key partners that have helped our clients access services and receive much needed assistance. We had the blessing of AmeriCorps support for a brief window to facilitate the staff position of Outreach Worker. We had a salary boost and medical/educational benefit within this program. Unfortunately, this program fell to the DOGE cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development on May 1st.
Local Non-profit status
CANUP is now active within our community as a recognized non-profit. We are recognized by our local municipalities, the press, law enforcement, and other related non-profits of the area. New donors and benefactors have stepped forward to assist funding. We have new partners who provide support services and access to food, supplies, furniture, appliances, and building materials.
Office at 1103 Tusculum Boulevard
CANUP has placed a delightful blue banner sign beneath the sunroom windows that face Tusculum Boulevard announcing our presence. It began last summer and took about 3 months to get the renovations completed to convert a one bedroom apartment into a three room office space. It has become a functional space for us to operate our organization. It is a fixed location from which we provide a variety of services. There is phone and internet access. We have volunteer and paid staff. The former bedroom is now our food pantry; the kitchen is hub for meals, washer/dryer, shower and toilet facilities, and the office for intakes and conversations. Our landlord kindly allowed us to offset rent with the contributions to renovate the floors of the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom; repair and paint the living room plaster walls; repair the glass and windows including the sunroom; replace the sunroom screen door with an added door; replace the ceiling tiles; adding a window air conditioner and a floor heater; replacing the fluorescent lights and electrical fixtures; upgrading the bathroom fixtures and commode; replacing the Tusculum facing mailbox rack for all five tenants of this property.
Client Services
Establishing an office with staffing has facilitated a marked increase in the services available to the unhoused clients in Greeneville. While our location houses the pantry, the meal packs are now organized on shelves and continually restocked by our supporting church groups. Clients shower and do laundry when they come by (as available). Phone and internet access is provided. Limited supplies of hygiene items, blankets, sleeping bags, clothes, shoes, tents, and propane tanks are given when needed and available. The office is key to the intake process that allows our outreach specialist to interview each client and begin to register them into the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) of ARCH. From there it is possible to identify need for documents, medical appointments, disability assessments, and barriers that impede access to housing and successful re-entry to living ‘indoors.’
Daily meal delivery to the known locations of clients continues and includes a limited number of ‘trap houses.’ The number of meal packs given out daily is between 25 and 38. This is managed by operations with a dedicated crew of drivers. Please refer to further details in the operations report.
Partners in Our Community
We have developed and expanded our relationships with faith based partners in Greeneville. This includes the following churches: St. James Episcopal, Tabernacle Church, Rheatown Community Church, Mt. Hebron Methodist, First Baptist, Cumberland Presbyterian, First Presbyterian, Notre Dame, Riverview Adventist, Asbury United Methodist, Cedar Creek Presbyterian, Greeneville’s Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, Mt. Pleasant United Methodist Church, and the 10/9 Church. Many of these churches are providing the meal packs that are the backbone of our feeding of the homeless. These meal packs are balanced with total calories among carbohydrates, fat, and protein. Water is also provided with each pack. Three churches provide hot meals on one day each week.
We have appreciated the annual warming shelter provided by Asbury United Methodist Church (AUMC) and administered by the C.A.R.E. center. Since this falls during the night of the P.I.T. count in January, we have been pleased to have the help of Rhonda Castro (C.A.R.E.) to identify those clients staying overnight that are not those we regularly see. This represents the opportunity for continued cooperation as we did with the joint grant application to the Hoston Foundation between CANUP, CARE and AUMC; and as we were hosted with CARE and the Family Resource Center at Shiloh Presbyterian’s Mission weekend this spring.
Relationships continue with Tabernacle Soup Kitchen and their Board as well as Cedar Creek Presbyterian Church and St. James Episcopal Church in provision of hot meals for clients once a week. Tabernacle also works with us to shepherd their resident unhoused client in the micro shelter placed on their site (beside the pavilion and church community garden) in October of last year.
AUMC has developed a construction team (similar to the Technology Student Association team from Towering Oaks School) to assist with micro shelter build; they also have continued to assist Bart and Judy Reviere at the Barton Hollow Farm site.
Personnel of CANUP
By far and away the greatest accomplishment this year has been the transition from a part time outreach specialist to a full time employee. Amy Blackwell has been on board in this capacity since December 31, 2024. She enjoyed AmeriCorps support until May 1st of this year. The Board of Directors made a decision in May to cover her salary until December 31, 2025. Further funding will depend on the results of fundraising and granting opportunities during the remainder of the calendar year.
Her operations report is included for details of her accomplishments since joining us as employee in December.
Micro Shelter Project
CANUP has placed two shelters for two clients at two different locations; one is in the city of Greeneville (on church property) and the other in the Warrensburg community (on private property). Two other shelters have been placed at 900 Holly Creek Road on private property for use for particular clients. The funding for these is strong and a 5th shelter is underway. The vision of a community of these shelters with supporting shared community space remains elusive. Bart and Judy Reviere are the lead builders for these structures with a team of volunteers. They use the barn facilities at Barton Hollow Farm in Afton.
Housing – Successes and Challenges
What does it mean to ‘house’ someone? CANUP does not own property but does have access to a limited number of units for rescue housing and occasional unit for transitional housing. Successfully ‘housing’ someone means to ‘aid’ or ‘assist’ into housing by actively reducing or going around barriers, by facilitating the contact to certain landlords favorable to housing our clients, and knowing the programs that are available to help qualified clients to access Fairview Housing or units at Greeneville Housing Authority. This is a process that requires advocacy, persistence, patience, and is exactly the type of talent possessed by our outreach specialist Amy Blackwell. Once housing occurs, the story often continues with the need to support clients with life skills and mentors who can commit to work with these individuals with money management, budgeting, and competing demands on resources.
Will CANUP ever be in the building business and have apartments or units to rent? The challenges here are quite steep and were made more so with the recent DOGE cutbacks to HUD funding and support of affordable housing. Non-profits that provide housing have quite sophisticated staffs and relationships with lenders who know the support funding network for subsidized housing. This is a vast universe of challenge with access to larger amount of capital for acquiring real-estate and then developing a property for mixed use and rental. While I am proud that CANUP has progressed as a non-profit, we are not likely to grow to a status sufficient to make us competitive within the housing arena in the next five years. The other unknown is how the local community views housing for the underserved and how they see this fitting into the mix of this type of housing in proximity to other zones in municipal planning.
Board of Directors
This Board has active participation from each of its members to the core mission of CANUP. Our most recent addition was Dr. Clem Allison, retired professor at Tusculum University. He knows the Tabernacle Soup Kitchen and many of the other ministries in our community that assist those with insecure housing, food, and employment. He is an active volunteer in many local charities and interest groups.
Recent Bylaws changes were undertaken by the Board. The Nominating Committee and its process was not felt to be useful for our members. The Bylaws have been amended to reflect those changes. We have good awareness of those interested in service because our Board remains engaged in client contact and service as well as volunteer activities.
