Martha O'Bryan Center

Journalist Charles Maldonado explores Nashville's food deserts, including lower East Nashville around Cayce Place. Among those he interviewed was Miriam Leibowitz, the program coordinator at Re/Storing Nashville, the food desert awareness and reduction campaign of Community Food Advocates, a 1-year-old nonprofit working to improve the quality and sustainability of Nashville’s food system. "This was certainly not a new idea. There have been campaigns to bring and retain supermarkets into Nashville’s food desert neighborhoods for 30 years, since urban renewal came in and grocery stores left North Nashville and East Nashville and Edgehill,” she says. “So we have been working with ...
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Meals on Wheels for Martha O'Bryan Center clients will be delivered during the Thanksgiving holiday thanks to a special partnership.

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Almost all of us can remember that guy who stayed in school because he wanted to play a sport. Playing first base or hitting that clutch jump shot was enough incentive to keep his grades where they needed to be. He wanted to be in the game, so it became important to him to be in school, doing the work, every day. The creation of the Academies of Nashville — smaller learning communities within each of Metro's zoned high schools with a career or thematic focus — has the potential to do the same thing for our students. Students will ...
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We like to think hunger is across the ocean, not just across the river.  Hunger is in residence in almost every corner of our city but particularly concentrated in our “belt communities” like lower east Nashville, surrounding our downtown. My office looks out over the parking lot of the Martha O’Bryan Center Food Bank and every day I see people come with hope and wait patiently for peanut butter and macaroni and if they are lucky, milk. Many I recognize as clients or children of the Center. Many you would recognize – the woman who takes your parking ticket, the handyman who replaced ...
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Today I did not drive up 7th Street. I was at a conference near Vanderbilt. As I left the stately old buildings and drove to my next appointment, I saw a somewhat unusual coed. She was dressed in black from head to toe. She was walking with purpose, head up, her sweet brown face lost in thought. The only thing that made her similar to the others on the street was her heavy backpack and her tennis shoes.    But she was familiar to me. It was Halima, one of our star students. Eighteen months ago, she was salutatorian of her high school, an area magnet school.
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