Martha O'Bryan Center

On a foundation of Christian faith, the Martha O'Bryan Center empowers children, youth, and adults in poverty to transform their lives through work, education, employment and fellowship.

Martha O’Bryan Center (Exceptional Youth, Strong Families, Full Lives) is a faith-based family resource Center founded in 1894, when Miss O’Bryan, a retired teacher, organized the Gleaners Society at First Presbyterian Church to work with the needy of North Nashville. In 1948, the group began operating at the current site in Cayce Place in east Nashville, where we continue to serve those struggling in poverty. Throughout our history, we have worked to address immediate and long-term needs to help Nashville’s most vulnerable families more fully realize their potential.

 

The families we serve in Cayce Place and surrounding east Nashville are faced with multiple barriers to success. They live in extreme poverty, in a high crime area, and with a dearth of transportation and technology options. Children attend historically low-performing schools where the drop-out rate is high, and the options for life after high school are few. We remove these barriers by providing a comprehensive network or "highway" of services, including educational programs covering pre-k to post-secondary years, that tracks with each child from birth to adulthood, while engaging the entire family. 

 

Presently, we are carrying out a new plan to strengthen our work with the families we serve and more fully realize mission. This initiative, begun in 2008, is enhancing our highway of services both by adding much-needed programming as well as by serving more of the people we've been unable to reach. Among new programs launched are our cutting-edge Tied Together parenting education program as well as our Work Reach for Youth services which operates in conjunction with our successful adult education program. 

 

Underway is the addition of a full-time community outreach coordinator to better assess need and build trust, RedCap data management for all programs, and increased out-of-school youth services. The latter includes staffing for literacy tutoring, Americorps, and positions to lower educator-student ratio. 

 

Our history reflects a model of service with deep roots in the past, and wide vision for the future to address poverty and individual need, while transforming a distressed community into a better place to live.

Currently Martha O'Bryan Center serves primarily children, youth, and families living in and around Cayce Place, Nashville's oldest, largest, and poorest public housing development. Cayce Place comprises 710 rental units with 2,400 residents crowded onto 63 acres. 88% of the population is African American; 89% of households are headed by a single woman; 59% of the residents are children under the age of 18.

 

We also serve families from the CWA Plaza Apartments, a development that houses 803 residents, 55% of whom are under the age of 18, and a large number of single-parent, female heads of households. A rapidly increasing immigrant population also characterizes these apartments with approximately 35% being Somali or Sudanese. 

 

Children from these families attend Maplewood and Stratford clusters, schools which are economically disadvantaged within the Metro Nashville School Systems. These schools have difficulties keeping students on track with literacy skills, reporting that 10% are below proficiency in reading and language and higher among ESL students. Nearly 25% of the students at Stratford High School do not graduate on time. Only 9% of males and 10% of females in our neighborhood complete post-secondary education—not even half as many as the national average which is 27% for males and 23% for females.

Martha O'Bryan Center and its extensive network of partners empower families to overcome their roadblocks to success. To provide expertise in specialized areas, we refer families to one or more of our many partners. Partners vary according to need. For example, for our Tied Together parenting program, these include Cayce Family Health Center, Nurses for Newborns, Planned Parenthood for Middle Tennessee, Tennessee Voices for Children, Nashville Public Libraries, and Our Kids. Other partners include, but are not limited to: MDHA (Metropolitan Development Housing Agency), HUD (Housing and Urban Development), CCW Learning Center, the YMCA, Oasis Center, Centerstone, Second Harvest, TAMCO (Tennessee Asset Management Company), Mental Health Cooperative, TN Department of Human Services, Metro Refugee Program, the Alcohol and Drug Council of Middle Tennessee, United Neighborhood Health Services, teachers and counselors from the Stratford and Maplewood clusters, Metro Social Services Relative Caregiver program, and Vanderbilt Counseling services.