Mission 

For 35 years, the Community Resource Center of Nashville has been a supply line to the front lines of poverty. Our mission is to empower our partner agencies to maintain their focus on providing critical services to Middle Tennessee’s most vulnerable populations by relieving them of the burden of securing basic essential products.

 

Overview

Founded in 1985, the Community Resource Center (known locally at the CRC) began as a simple wish-list published in The Tennessean asking the community to donate basic household items for people in need. Since then, the CRC has become Nashville’s lead agency in times of crisis, and the nonprofit community’s go-to resource for ongoing essential product needs.

More than 300 nonprofit agencies across 9 counties in Middle Tennessee rely on the CRC to provide thousands of hygiene and cleaning kits throughout the year. The CRC manages this from its own 5,000-square-foot warehouse and office space in Nashville at which product is received, stored, packaged and distributed. In 2020, the CRC provided approximately $10 million in product to both our nonprofit partners and directly to clients, reaching over 1 Million people in our coverage area.

The CRC is the official materials manager for the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management in Davidson County. From the 2010 Nashville flood to the 2020 tornados in Nashville through ongoing COVID-19 relief, the CRC has been able to immediately receive, store, inventory and redistribute donations for effective and efficient disaster relief and recovery. In a crisis, the CRC is able to expand its reach and secure additional warehouse space to manage the rapid influx of incoming donations. As a volunteer-driven agency, our ability to rally, organize and deploy volunteers allows us to scale up immediately to meet the needs of a community in crisis. 

Partnering for Maximum Impact

More than 30% of American families struggle to afford essential non-food items and are therefore forced to make trade-offs on other living expenses, including forgoing buying food.* 

We stretch every dollar we receive. Because we can buy at scale, we are able to pool donor funds and purchase items in bulk, sometimes via large-scale liquidation sales, at much lower cost than our partner agencies could afford themselves. By partnering with manufacturers, distribution centers and retailers (both at the corporate and local level), we acquire new merchandise at no cost. And we also leverage our network of other donor partners, such as partnering with local food banks so they can hand off non-food items to us, while we direct food donations to them. 

By taking on the responsibility of having essential items in stock and available, the CRC frees our partner agencies to maintain focus on their missions and services. They spend less time holding product drives and more time providing services and support for their clients.