BRADY FLANIGANStaff Writer

Lauren Fitzgerald walked into Westside Nazarene because she needed to fill her belly—and her family’s—not her soul.

Her husband had been institutionalized. Their house had burned. She had three children and no income. “You couldn’t talk to me about the big picture,” she said. “You couldn’t sit me down and say, ‘Let’s look at your choices.’ That didn’t speak to me.”

What did: a hot meal. A $25 gift card. Someone else keeping her children occupied with glue sticks and stickers while she exhaled for the first time all week.

That was her introduction to Bridges Out of Poverty, a program built on a 1999 book of the same name and planted in Tullahoma by First Church of the Nazarene. It doesn’t offer soup lines or cover rent. It offers a mirror.

The premise is simple enough, at first: poverty isn’t about money. It’s about mindset. It’s about learned habits, fractured planning, short-term thinking, and what the program calls “invisible resources.”

Teaching people to fish, not giving them fish, as Tullahoma’s executive director Ernie Jones puts it. “There’s plenty of fish-givers,” he said. “But not much transformation. You give a man a fish, he eats once. You teach him to fish, he’ll eat forever. Unless he sells the pole, right?”

“Poverty is dependency,” he added. “Middle class is independence. Victim mentality to—I’m responsible for myself.”

The classes run 18 to 20 weeks. Participants are called “investigators.” The closest thing to a teacher is called a “facilitator.” They don’t teach so much as moderate. Bridges says you’re not there to be fixed. You’re there to name your patterns, out loud, in a room of people doing the same.

“Victims don’t recover,” Fitzgerald said. “If everything’s someone else’s fault, why change?”

“Victims can’t recover,” facilitator Will Prater said. “It doesn’t matter what you give them. If they’re stuck in that, nothing changes.”

The program resembles church. Not in doctrine—just rhythm. Dinner comes first. Conversation second. Then come the gift cards. Childcare is provided. Facilitators are former students, trained to keep the room moving but not steer it. Participants read the curriculum together and talk through it as a group.

“There were more volunteers than participants my first night,” Fitzgerald said. “And they weren’t there to fix anyone. They sat at the table. They asked how our day was. They kept showing up.”

The theory is that consistent presence—quiet, nonjudgmental, unpaid—can do what sermons can’t. “Sometimes it feels like we’re just dangerously broke people trying to take care of other dangerously broke people,” she said. “And maybe that’s what makes it work.”

The Tullahoma version of Bridges began when Pastor Scott Roberts, formerly of Pensacola, brought the idea to town. He had seen it in Muskogee, Oklahoma—one of the more established chapters. Tullahoma’s version launched with an endowment to the church. That seed money funds the meals, the gift cards, the childcare, and the two core classes: “Getting Ahead” and “Staying Ahead”.

The first class isn’t about financial literacy. “That’s the number-one myth,” Fitzgerald said. “That poverty is a financial problem. It’s absolutely not.”

Instead, Bridges teaches that people are poor because they’re operating with a deficit of “resources”—emotional, spiritual, relational, mental, physical. Financial is one of eleven. It comes last.

“Money is not even top,” Jones said. “Not in the first 18 weeks.”

“You drop a million dollars in a poverty individual—it’ll be gone,” he said. “Give it to someone from wealth or with an achiever mindset—it’ll be passed down.”

Participants spend weeks discussing family dynamics, mental health, social capital, internalized habits, and the “hidden rules” of class structure before a dollar ever hits the page.

Bridges is built around what it calls “aha moments.” The curriculum is designed to move slowly, from surface-level habits to deeper mental framing.

“You can’t look inside and recognize what are my subconscious habits, beliefs that are driving my direction in life,” Fitzgerald said, “until you have that aha moment.”

Prater remembers the session that stayed with him. “We talked about title loans,” he said. “My wife and I had one for a year and a half. We’d go in, pay ten dollars over, and re-borrow. We thought we were being smart. That was our plan.”

“I walked out of that crying,” he said. “Not because I was sad. Because I was mad that no one had told me any of this before.”

Bridges encourages participants to reframe their language and treat their lives as data. The term “investigator” isn’t ornamental. It’s central. “I was the first person in Tullahoma to go through Bridges,” Prater said. “Now I’m leading it.”

Jones described the final stretch of the course as a planning exercise. “We’re asking: Why am I in poverty, and how do I want to come out?” he said. “What is it I’m doing to stay here, and what is the outside world doing to keep me here?”

The class costs about $1,000 per person to operate. No one draws a salary. The program is funded through private donations, church support, and the endowment. Fitzgerald, Prater, and Jones all serve as volunteers. Admission is selective—applicants are interviewed, background-checked, and must be “out of crisis.”

“If you’re in active homelessness, the class probably isn’t helpful yet,” Fitzgerald said. “When you’re starving, you don’t need the big picture. You need a sandwich.”

“Bridges isn’t designed for people in crisis,” Jones said. “But it helps people get out of it.”

“You’re out-of-sight poverty if you’re homeless,” he said. “That’s a different level.”

Once participants complete Getting Ahead, they can move on to Staying Ahead, which includes budgeting, insurance, debt management, and a segment on Dave Ramsey.

The goal is stability through internal change. The belief is that if you start thinking like a middle-class person, you’ll become one. Not necessarily in income—but in behavior. That’s where momentum starts.

“When we took the class, we were making over $100,000,” Fitzgerald said. “Now we’re at a third of that—but we have savings, we have an emergency fund, we have a plan. We’re not in poverty anymore.”

To Bridges, poverty is less about how much you have and more about how you think about what you don’t.

“Disciplined people make good choices,” Jones said, quoting Alabama football coach Nick Saban. “Undisciplined people make bad choices that hurt themselves and the people around them.”

“So poverty is loaded with undisciplined,” he added.

Participants are taught to observe how different classes talk, dress, move. “You keep a blazer in the car,” Prater said, “so you can slip it on over a T-shirt and still look like a professional.”

“You listen to how people speak,” Jones said. “In two sentences you can tell which class they’re from.”

“You can tell by how they talk about time,” he added. “And I can tell you—people at the Dossett Homes? They speak differently.”

“We didn’t have internet at home,” Prater added. “So when the school was sending homework online, we had to drive to McDonald’s and park out front.”

The theory is that you move between classes by mimicking them first—learning the rules, blending in. The curriculum refers to them as “hidden rules.”

“Spiritually speaking, I think it’s a divine generational curse,” Jones said. “But don’t say that.”

“We’re not trying to build our kingdom,” he said. “We’re trying to build the kingdom. Or the human race.”

No one in the room names wealth as their goal.

“I don’t want to be wealthy,” Prater said. “If I ever got there, I’d start giving it back. I’ve met plenty of wealthy people who don’t want to let go of anything.”

“I want to be more successful,” Fitzgerald said, “so now I meet with businessmen and other people who are further ahead on the path that I would like. I’m grateful they let me come be a part of—with my questions of naivety.”

“I want my children to understand their core values before they’re challenged with outside points,” she added. “So I don’t let them go just anywhere.”

Sometimes, they call it seed-sowing.

“We’re not gatekeepers,” Fitzgerald said. “We’re supposed to share it.”

That sharing, in the Bridges framework, becomes its own kind of wealth. Not dollars, but presence. Not assets, but behavior.

You get stability. You pass it on.

A volunteer helps you. You show up the next year to help someone else.

And if you’re still barely above water?

You sit at the table anyway.