The front door | How VMC helps Knox County navigate homelessness
The Volunteer Ministry Center's Bush Family Refuge is the starting point for housed and unhoused residents alike. Director Valerie Combs explains what walking through the door actually looks like.
Walking down Broadway through the “Mission District,” it is clear the neighborhood is dense with help. Within a single block, you will find the Metro Drug Coalition’s Gateway, the Salvation Army, Knox Area Rescue Ministries (KARM), and the Volunteer Ministry Center (VMC), each aiding different people and covering different corners of wrap-around support.
But when you are navigating the complexities of homelessness, or the risk of losing your home, it can be hard to know where to go first.
Knock on the door
VMC wants people to know that the Bush Family Refuge is the front door to those resources. And when they arrive, Valerie Combs is the first face they will see. As director of the center, she sees that “open door” as the whole point.
VMC’s Bush Family Refuge is the starting point for resources for the community, housed and unhoused. We work alongside partner agencies to get folks who are experiencing homelessness into permanent housing.
Combs said anyone can walk into VMC. The center keeps an open-door policy for newcomers, repeat visitors, and curious community members alike.
Every person’s story is different
“As a society, we want to kind of pigeonhole why folks are experiencing homelessness,” Combs said. “But for every person who walks through our door, it’s a completely different story.”
Some people are teetering on the edge of losing their housing because of rising rent, climbing utilities, or unmanageable debt. Last year, VMC helped support 178 community members with utility and rental assistance funds to keep them in housing.
Other people have lived on the street for months or years, and their path to permanent housing is crowded with reintegration challenges. In 2025, 22 folks received rapid-rehousing services, and ten were placed in a permanent home.
Across all services, VMC housed 90 people in 2025. But no two housing re-entry situations look the same.
“One major barrier we see often is that someone may be missing a birth certificate, ID, or Social Security card. That’s a major barrier to navigate,” Combs said. “And we help people go through that process.”
Other hurdles are smaller but no less real. Sometimes it is a pair of work shoes, because you cannot show up to a job site without them. VMC accepts donations of purchased shoes to support that gap.
Sometimes the hurdle is a shower. VMC ran 3,523 mobile showers to help unhoused people maintain hygiene throughout the seasons last year.
And sometimes the barrier is medical, like dental work. It is hard to eat, talk, or obtain employment while battling prolonged tooth pain. To help this, the VMC Dental Clinic conducted 1,500 dental procedures across 705 patient visits in 2025.
VMC doesn’t shy away from any of it.
“One of the struggles in our community is just the ping-ponging folks do to get support,” Combs said. “That can be really hard, especially if they’re on foot.”
Starting with a CHAMP assessment
So what does the front door actually look like?
In 2025, about 7,000 people received information and referral services from the Bush Family Refuge. These are people from all walks of life – various races, ethnicities, religions, and backgrounds.
The goal, Combs explained, is to encourage each person to take a CHAMP assessment. VMC is the designated access point for the program, which connects people experiencing homelessness to housing services.
The assessment maps the specific barriers a person faces so VMC and its partner organizations know where to start. From there, if the person is willing, they are matched with a case manager, either at VMC or at another agency in town.
A case manager might provide Knoxville Area Transit (KAT) bus passes for doctor’s appointments and new employment, work-appropriate clothing, and non-slip or steel-toe shoes, help replace identification such as Social Security cards and birth certificates, mental health and prescription support, and rent or utility assistance.
Seeing the human in everyone
Behind each of those services is a person in a hard moment.
“People sometimes come in in complete fight-or-flight, just scared to death to either lose their housing or not even know where to start,” Combs said.
Often, she said, there is no safety net to fall back on.
“With so many of these individuals, there’s no family or a partner or anyone,” Combs said. “Maybe their apartment complex doesn’t know they’ve been hospitalized, someone missed two months of rent, and the eviction process starts. Sometimes it’s just as simple as someone needing help navigating that.”
That last part is the piece Combs most wants the community to hear: The line between housed and unhoused is thinner than most people assume, Combs explained.
You would be surprised how many people are working but living paycheck to paycheck. It might just be one uncontrollable circumstance that puts them in a situation where they need to leverage our resources.
And it is why she lights up when the work lands. Often, that comes in the form of case management and housing navigation, where someone is prevented from being on the street altogether, or a longtime chronically homeless individual commits to a program.
Combs said that is what the front door of VMC’s Bush Family Refuge is for– to help a neighbor, a coworker, or a stranger who simply did not know where to start.
“I would encourage anyone and everyone to give us a call, stop by, come visit the refuge,” Combs said. “See what we’re doing here in Knox County, and see how you can get involved.”
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