Nashville as a Destination | Somali

Bill Sinclair, now the Executive Director of Catholic Charities of Tennessee, helped resettle the first refugees to Nashville in 1975.  At that time, Sinclair was hired temporarily by the Catholic Charities Diocese of Nashville as the city’s sole refugee resettlement caseworker.  He traveled to Fort Chaffey Arkansas, where Vietnamese refugees had been living on the military base for more than a year.  Sinclair relocated almost 370 refugees in the first three months and started Nashville on its path to become one of the largest refugee destination cities in the Southeast.  Through an initial process of trial and error, Nashville became a highly successful resettlement site.