One Bench at a Time

A seed, a bench, and a bet on connection

The Walnut Street Bridge reopened as a pedestrian bridge in 1993. I was in high school, playing basketball at my school just a few blocks away. When the bridge reopened, it had been closed for decades, our coach gave our team the assignment to run “two bridges” meaning run from the school across the Veterans bridge (a parallel bridge) and then back across the Walnut street bridge before coming back to the gym for practice. It was his version of a conditioning run, and back then we didn’t think much of it at the time, it was just a bridge, and we were doing what our coach told us to do.

But really, it wasn’t just a bridge.

Photo by Sarah Swainson on Unsplash

That bridge gave Chattanooga a reason to show up in the same place. It pulled people out of their cars and onto their feet, next to the river, next to each other. The city that grew up around it, the restaurants, the parks, the Riverwalk, didn’t happen despite that bridge; no, it happened because of what the bridge made possible, which connected two parts of the city in an accessible, user friendly way. It seems small to look back on this moment, but it was a time where something as simple as offering a new walking path across the city changed the downtown dynamic.

Recently, a friend reached out and told me that Chattanooga’s National Park City initiative was looking for ideas. Seeds, they called them, and the seeds were to be submitted and then a select number of them would be planted across the park system in the city. They knew I was a mental health person, and they were looking for some type of mental health seed.

I met with some local leaders, drew on my own experience and the research I’d been sitting with, and proposed Chatt Spots: dedicated benches in our parks, painted and distinct, staffed by trained community volunteers. Not therapists. Neighbors. People from this city who know how to listen and how to point someone toward help when they need more than a conversation. Everyone feels the profound need for more mental health care, why not get creative and try something new? And, what if some of that care gap could be closed on a park bench?

It’s not a hypothetical, and if you’ve read this Substack before, you know about the great work of people like Dixon Chibanda, Vikram Patel, Daisy Singla, Brandon Kohrt, and so many more, who have created rich evidence on how we can equip frontline folks with skills to help each other. Their ideas have traveled. Gothenburg has “Chatty Benches” while Zimbabwe (and others) have the “Friendship Bench.” Everyday people can be taught the skills to help in significant ways around mental health.

What I found genuinely inspiring was the structure of how they approached the entire effort. Anyone could submit a seed. Anyone could vote. The seeds with the most votes earned a spot in a shark tank-style pitch in front of community leaders, who decided what got planted, what received funding, and a real shot at implementation. I love this because it is civic participation designed to actually work.

I honestly didn’t expect much attention. But people voted, and before long I found myself in a room full of leaders all wanting their idea to move forward. There were some cools ones like a project transforming an underused alley into a neighborhood gathering space with benches, murals, bug hotels, a little library, kids playing foursquare on pavement that used to be nowhere. Or what about a vision to build community traffic gardens so every child in the county has a safe place to learn to ride a bike, regardless of their zip code. There was one that was an eight-acre park along South Chickamauga Creek that was being restored to native forest and meadow, layered with history going back to Dragging Canoe’s Cherokee settlement. You could argue, and I would, that every single one of those ideas is a mental health intervention. Green space, play, safety, belonging, the research doesn’t separate these things the way our systems do.

One presenter brought a goat. I brought a bench.

I sat down on it alone, in front of the room, and talked for ninety seconds about the power of connection. The irony wasn’t lost on me. But that image of one person, one bench, making the case that nobody should have to carry things alone, felt like exactly the right argument to make from exactly the right seat.

Here’s the vision. During peak hours, including evenings, weekends, lunch on a Saturday, a trained volunteer sits on a distinctly painted bench in a Chattanooga park. The bench signals its purpose without clinical branding. The signage asks a simple question: Want to Chatt? This isn’t therapy so there’s no appointment, no cost, no judgment, just one person being there for another.

The science on the setting is unambiguous: green space, open air, proximity to water reduce cortisol and support emotional regulation. The park is already doing some of the work before anyone sits down. The volunteer does the rest, while mainly is active listening, a real conversation, and when someone needs more, a warm handoff or connection to local resources. I see this as the lowest possible threshold for connection, and come on, you’re already in the park!

I don’t know exactly what grows from a seed like this, but what’s cool is that this is the nature of seeds. What I know is that a bridge changed this city once. Not because of what it was made of, but because of what it made possible. People showing up in the same place. Finding each other. Something shifting.

A bench can do that too. I’m betting on it.