Martha Meeks looks towards the window at the CHATT Foundation where she works as a Peer Support Specialist. She uses her lived experiences to guide and support unhoused individuals in the Chattanooga area. Friday, October 16, 2026. (Photo by Ashlyn Yoes)
Martha Meeks spent seven years unhoused, sleeping inside tents and under bridges, afraid to fall asleep. Today, she is a Peer Support Specialist at the CHATT Foundation, and spends every day helping people who are living through what she experienced.
Housing had been a struggle for Meeks since being put out of her home by her foster parents at the age of 16. In 2008, she was in college, working two jobs and raising a child, when an incident occurred that caused her to have a nervous breakdown. She became unhoused, an experience she says is far more common than people may expect.
“It really could happen to anybody,” said Meeks. “That could be your child.”
Shanelle Reeves Wright is a mom of two children; one graduated, and one currently in the NICU at Erlanger Hospital. With both pregnancies bringing unexpected hardships, Shanelle has found a new appreciation for the team at the hospital as well as the Ronald Mcdonald House, which has offered her a home away from home during her time spent in the Chattanooga area.
The halls of Erlanger Hospital often ring with cheers at the news of a child finally going home – an announcement Shanelle Reeves-Wright knew well, and one she hoped would soon be reason for celebration within her own family.
Originally from Cartersville, Georgia, Reeves-Wright was five months into her pregnancy when she and her husband, Otis Wright, learned they would need to deliver their firstborn 15 weeks early at Erlanger Hospital: over seventy-seven miles from home.
Shanelle Reeves-Wright and her daughter, Penelope Jade, at the NICU in Erlanger Baroness in downtown Chattanooga. Although her daughter is surrounded by medical equipment, Reeves-Wright takes comfort knowing her daughter has been well-cared for. Thursday, October 1, 2026. (Photo by Noah Blount)
“All of a sudden it was like, oh, you’re going to pack up by ambulance, and we’re sending you to Erlanger,” Reeves-Wright recalls. “Didn’t know what that was, didn’t know where that was, and we were both like, what’s an Erlanger?”
The anonymous artist behind Potholes of Chattanooga cleans up her street installation. The 70s-classic smiley face is accompanied by morse code that reads “S-M-I-L-E” (Photo by Kayleyn McCaslin).
A dip of the steering wheel. An unexpected two-inch drop down. A sudden slosh of hot coffee. Another Chattanooga pothole deep enough to drown a tire, and wide enough to ruin a morning. While any street in the city has its own inconvenient imperfections, some gaps are filled by something unexpected: bright yellow mosaic smiley faces, grinning up from the asphalt.
They appear subtly, often overnight, on side streets that usually don’t warrant second thought. Evenly spread throughout town, there is no rhyme or reason to the installations other than the fact that they each take the place of a pothole. But this is not the city healing broken pavement.
Instead, it is the work of a faceless mosaic artist who has sought both personal revenge and silly enjoyment by filling potholes in secret.
Sylvie Lawrence, a ShowerUp Volunteer, speaks about how the non-profit organization ShowerUp serves those that are unhoused or anyone that is in need of a helping hand. They provide mobile showers, hygiene kits, laundry, and personal care items. Their main goal is to spread hope and love to the community of Chattanooga Tennessee.
On a beautiful, chilly morning, amid the city sounds of traffic and train rumbles, laughter and cries of joy fill the streets of Chattanooga, Tennessee. These cheerful groups stand outside a mobile trailer that promises a hot, steamy shower for the unhoused and those who need a helping hand. On the side of the trailer, the word “ShowerUp” reads: a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing hope, love, and compassion to the Chattanooga community.
“ShowerUp, in my own words, is this non-profit that is there for other people…we want to evaluate the dignity that they [the unhoused] already have and let them know what they’re really worth,” said John Justin Lin, a ShowerUp Operational Manager.
ShowerUp’s journey began 10 years ago, when Paul and Rhonda Schmitz handed out sandwiches to the unhoused. They built relationships with people on the streets and realized that they could do more than provide meals. The couple asked themselves: What do people need most? The answer to that wasn’t money, food, or clothes; it was a regular shower. Since then, a mobile community built on compassion has expanded from Nashville, TN, to Chattanooga in June 2023.
Chattanooga Tree Project is a local nonprofit in Chattanooga, Tennessee, dedicated to planting trees in neighborhoods with low canopy coverage. Chris Winters (Director of Workforce), discuses the the team’s efforts of planting over 900 trees in the last year with the help of volunteers and the community. In the next four years, they plan to plant an additional 4,000 trees in the surrounding area.
In the sweltering summer heat, sweat drips down the necks of residents as they walk along the bustling streets of Chattanooga, Tennessee in search of shade. While some are able to find reprieve amongst the tree-lined paths, there are many areas around the city that are noticeably lacking these resources.
To address this problem, the City of Chattanooga was awarded a $6 million dollar grant from the United States Forest Service in April 2024 to fund the Chattanooga Tree Project (CTP). This project is dedicated to planting thousands of native tree species to increase canopy coverage across the city in neighborhoods that need them the most.
Volunteers use pickaxes to break up the rocky soil in Ridgedale neighborhood. Saturday, November 8, 2025 (Photo by Corbin Winters).
“From start to finish, I’ve spent a lot of my time mapping forest loss, and the data has shown that over the years, we’re losing forests in Chattanooga,” said Mimi White, graduate research assistant for the UTC Interdisciplinary Geospatial Technologies (IGT) lab. “A lot of the trees that we’re planting, we’re planting in neighborhoods that have lost their tree cover a long time ago,… so it’s really beautiful to walk through a neighborhood in Chattanooga and see the new trees that have been planted and know that the people who live in these neighborhoods are going to be able to enjoy the benefits that come with having a healthy urban forest years down the road.”
Cash Daniels, a 16-year-old conservationist, offers insight into his efforts to clean up plastic waste by focusing on fishing line. With his initiative now operating in six states, Daniels has garnered national attention and accolades for his projects and hopes to continue raising awareness about plastic waste clean-up.
Walking along the shoreline, a small plastic straw reflects the sun’s rays and catches a child’s eye, sparking a life dedicated to making a change in the man-made, polluted environment. At the age of 7, this is precisely what happened to Cash Daniels.
“Before that, I had always loved getting out on the river: fishing, kayaking, swimming, things like that. When I found that plastic straw, I knew it would harm the animals in the environment that I loved, so I knew I had to do something to help defend it,” said Daniels. “Due to that, I have been able to remove 46,000 pounds of trash from the river so far.”
Cash Daniels shows off a jar of his collected fishing line. Throughout Cash Daniels’ conservation efforts, he collected over 2,200 miles of used fishing line. Thursday, October 15, 2025 (Photo by Corbin Winters).
Plastic waste is ever-present on the banks of the Tennessee River and Chattanooga Creek, harming aesthetics and the biodiverse habitats. With these waterways so close to Daniels’ home, he felt a personal responsibility to do something to help sustain and improve them. Daniels, now a 16-year-old Chattanooga, Tennessee native, has shown his passion for cleaning up the environment around him by constructing and placing fishing line recycling bins in six states.
Dr. Bernie Kuhajda, an Aquatic Conservation Biologist at the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute (TNACI), speaks about the critically endangered Laurel Dace. The small minnow is only found in three streams along Walden Ridge. TNACI rescued the last remaining population during a historical drought in the summer of 2024.
50 miles North of Chattanooga, a thumb-sized anomaly swims between the rocks and moss of the small streams on Walden Ridge. To the unknown eye, these fish, known as the Laurel Dace, could easily be overlooked or mistaken for any other small freshwater fish that is found in East Tennessee. The rarity of the fish doesn’t come only from their size and characteristics, but the extremely specific area they are found. Since their discovery in the 1950s, the Laurel Dace have only been found in one location in the world, Walden Ridge.
The limited environment the Laurel Dace inhabit causes an extremely small population to begin with. In 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officially listed the Laurel Dace as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). From first discovery, this species was found in only nine streams at Walden Ridge, but over the past 25 years, that number has shrunk drastically. Over several decades, because of continued agriculture, dry seasons, and increased sedimentation, the Laurel Dace are now only seen having a healthy population in Bumbee Creek on Walden Ridge.
Once the fish were recognized as critically endangered, the Tennessee Aquarium and the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute (TNACI) stepped in and began their preservation efforts. Over time, the TNACI continued to keep a close eye on the Laurel Dace by studying their environments and behaviors. Several rescues have been conducted where teams would go to Bumbee Creek and take several fish into their care for further monitoring and research. Through their ongoing observations in the wild, the TNACI was also able to take fast action to save the Laurel Dace when circumstances became drastic.
Katy Neusner steps in to help pack Sack Packs for children who may not have food at home to help sustain them through the weekend. Tuesday, April 29, 2025. Photo by Alexis Carpenter.
The warehouse lights flicker on as volunteers walk through the door and make their way to rows of stacked pallets and assembly lines. The scent of produce and cardboard boxes mingle in the humid atmosphere, and the sound of pop music fills the large warehouse. Volunteers begin to sort canned goods, bag fresh vegetables, and prepare boxes for distribution.
Yet, beneath this effort lies a growing crisis. The Chattanooga Area Food Bank, a lifeline for residents across 20 counties in Tennessee and Georgia, is dealing with significant funding cuts. A nationwide halt of $500 million in federal food aid, including the suspension of USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation funding, has resulted in the cancellation of multiple truckloads of food. These shipments are now absent from the food bank’s inventory, leaving bare shelves within the warehouse.
In the midst of the working warehouse is Katy Neusner, the Advocacy and Communications Coordinator of the Chattanooga Area Food Bank. As the organization works to bridge the gap left by the funding cuts, Neusner and her colleagues face a task of sustaining their mission amid dwindling resources.
Olympia Garcia Lopez talks about her experience as a Guatemalan immigrant in Chattanooga and how she came to find La Paz.
For those building new lives in Chattanooga, the journey often begins with an organization like La Paz. Even at a time of rapidly shifting policy and funding changes, this organization isn’t going anywhere, and remains firmly committed to the people they serve.
La Paz is a Latino services non-profit organization with a stated goal of “empowering and engaging Chattanooga’s Latino population through advocacy, education, and inclusion.”
“From the very beginning we’ve encountered many Hispanic men coming to Chattanooga for work opportunities, and they started coming in with their families. The needs start changing from job opportunities or like documentation to other processes, more programs, more resources that they need for the whole family instead of just an individual” said Daniela Durán, the communication coordinator for La Paz.
