A SHAREBUILT STORY: BUILDING A HOME FOR HOPE
How ShareBuilt walked alongside The Refuge Center for Counseling as it built a new campus in Franklin, Tennessee.
On a wooded hillside along Long Lane, just south of Franklin, a path winds past a healing garden toward a prayer labyrinth. Laughter drifts over from the children’s playground. Inside a lodge-style building tucked into the trees, someone is sitting down with a counselor for the first time, paying a fee set by what they can afford rather than what the market charges.
This is The Refuge Center for Counseling. Its name comes from Isaiah 4:6, the promise of “a refuge and a hiding place from the storm and the rain.” For more than two decades, The Refuge Center has been exactly that for families across Williamson County and beyond. Now it has a building to match.
Hope Anyone Can Afford
Amy Alexander and Jennifer Thames-Hamilton, both licensed marriage and family therapists, opened The Refuge Center in December 2005 after noticing something easy to miss from the outside. In one of Tennessee’s most prosperous counties, affordable counseling was nearly impossible to find. They built a Christ-centered practice around a sliding-scale fee, so no one would ever be turned away for lack of income.
In its first year, the center held 516 sessions with 90 people. Today, more than 70 therapists provide over 40,000 sessions a year to more than 4,200 people, and up to 98 percent of those sessions are offered on the sliding scale. Growth like that needs room, and space takes a long time to build.
A Thirteen-Year Road
The dream of a permanent campus took shape in strategic planning meetings in 2013. What followed was a long lesson in patience. The team vetted 42 properties before choosing the Long Lane hillside, which then had to be annexed into the City of Franklin and rezoned, with an 18-month community engagement process along the way. Architect Bauer Askew joined the effort in 2016. Solomon Builders replaced an initial contractor and managed an extensive value engineering process to bring the construction budget back to roughly $10.8 million Guaranteed Maximum Price in 2023.
By the time The Refuge Center broke ground in July 2023, it had one more need: an owner’s representative to guide it through construction. That kind of help wasn’t in the budget.
ShareBuilt was still a young organization, very much under construction itself. Steve Kuhn, ShareBuilt’s executive director and founder, committed anyway, stepping in to serve as The Refuge Center’s Project Shepherd for as long as the project needed one.
Walking Alongside
Like many nonprofits, The Refuge Center has a remarkably capable staff, but few of them had ever been through a building project. ShareBuilt was there to fill in those gaps, so the people who know how to care for hurting families never had to feel lost in a world of pay applications and change orders.
From September 2023 through October 2024, Steve walked alongside Mari Garner, The Refuge Center’s Associate Director, through every phase of construction. That meant sitting in on biweekly owner-architect-contractor meetings, reviewing every pay application and change order, advising on schedule, budget, and contract questions like retainage, and helping the team think through each decision an owner faces on the way to move-in. All of it came at no cost to The Refuge Center.
ShareBuilt helped The Refuge Center deliver its $10.8 million counseling center project while generating nearly $300,000 of documented financial benefit through donated owner’s representative services and owner-direct-purchase tax savings. The support allowed The Refuge Center leadership to stay focused on serving clients rather than managing construction challenges.
“We found a trusted partner in ShareBuilt,” said Mari. “They know the industry and have the expertise we did not have, not being in the construction world, but so desperately needed. That’s why ShareBuilt and its concept are so great.”
“We found a trusted partner in ShareBuilt. They know the industry and have the expertise we did not have, not being in the construction world, but so desperately needed. That’s why ShareBuilt and its concept are so great.”
— Mari Garner, Associate Director, The Refuge Center for Counseling
Room to Grow
The Refuge Center moved into its new home in late 2024 and celebrated its grand opening in April 2025. More than a bigger address, it is room to answer an overwhelming demand for affordable mental health care, with more children and teens expected among the people walking through its doors. It is also more room to grow deeper: a place where healing can happen on a garden path as surely as in a counselor’s office.
A Room with ShareBuilt’s Name on It
Perhaps the most meaningful sign of the partnership came after the last punch-list item was checked off. The Refuge Center named a room in its new building in honor of ShareBuilt, a recognition usually reserved for financial donors. In 2026, the center’s Director of Advancement invited ShareBuilt to join the individuals and companies honored with named spaces in a donor video series. The Refuge Center also made a gift back to ShareBuilt, a gesture that captures the spirit of partnership at the heart of its model.
That recognition says what numbers alone cannot. Guidance, advocacy, and expertise, given freely, can be as valuable to a nonprofit as a financial gift.
The Refuge Center’s promise to everyone who comes through its doors is simple: You don’t have to walk this road alone. It’s the promise ShareBuilt hopes to keep for its nonprofit partners for many years to come.