.jpg "Ashley Blum, LBSW, CPRP photo")
Director, Homeless Outreach Services
Park Center
Nashville, Tennessee
Ashley Blum is a Nashville, Tenn., native who holds a bachelor’s degree in social work from Belmont University in 2006. She is the director of Park Center’s Homeless Outreach Services, a non-profit mental health organization in Nashville that empowers people to live and work in their communities. She has been with Park Center since 2007, when she started as a case manager. In 2009 she transitioned onto the Homeless Outreach team where she was one of two SSI/SSDI, outreach access and recovery (SOAR) coordinators, assisting people obtain disability benefits through the Social Security Administration using the national SOAR process. In 2010, she was chosen to attend the SOAR train the trainer training through Policy Research Associates and began building and maintaining the SOAR Network in Nashville. Blum became the supervisor of the program in 2012 and after growing the program, became the director. They now have a 24-person team and she provides oversight to four supervisors, a manager of housing partnerships, a supply coordinator, an administrative assistant, four SOAR coordinators, five outreach workers, four housing navigators and three data staff who work with some of the most vulnerable and marginalized people in Nashville. They provide street outreach to people experiencing homelessness and in-reach to people in the Regional Mental Health Hospital and help connect them to services to meet their basic needs, like income and insurance through SOAR, SNAP, mental or substance use treatment, employment and housing. Throughout her career, Blum has worked very hard to fill gaps in the Nashville community by bringing essential programs to Park Center, like building partnerships with hospitals and clinics to provide street medicine and care to people experiencing homelessness. One of her favorite accomplishments in this work, is that she has been part of assisting over 1,200 people experiencing homelessness access disability benefits and insurance through SOAR, in an average of 51 days.
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Tuesday, April 12, 2022
1:00 PM – 1:30 PM
