Nashville, Tennessee — June 2026
It started as a whispered promise across a kitchen table almost two decades ago. Tonight, drone photos reveal steel frames climbing a green Tennessee hillside, and the dream that Alan and Denise Jackson once sketched on loose-leaf paper is turning into bricks, beams, and bedrooms. The $22-million complex—officially named Haven Hollow Village—is scheduled to welcome its first families by Christmas, offering brothers and sisters in foster care something the paperwork rarely guarantees: a chance to stay together.
The first site visit feels less like a construction tour than the soft opening of a new community. Concrete paths already trace gentle curves between cottage lots; a half-finished playground stands under a stand of oaks, its unpainted swing set creaking in the evening breeze. Alan Jackson, 67, walks the gravel in scuffed boots and a familiar cream cowboy hat, pausing to run a calloused hand along unfinished porch rails. “We wanted it to feel like the kind of neighborhood we grew up in,” he says, voice low, soft edges of rural Georgia still intact. “Porches you can wave from, dinner bells instead of buzzers.”
Fighting for a blueprint nobody asked for
The Jacksons’ idea was simple but bureaucratically awkward: build a cluster of small houses rather than a single institution, give each sibling group a stable foster-parent couple, and surround them with on-site counselors, tutors, and pediatric care. Local zoning officials loved the heart, balked at the footprint, and spent years volleying setback requirements and traffic studies. Denise—whose calm presence belies a steel resolve—became the project’s tactical lead, attending county-commission meetings with spreadsheets tucked beside her Bible. At one session she held up a framed photo of her three daughters as toddlers and asked, “Which one would you vote to separate?”
Funding hurdles followed zoning battles. Jackson could have written a personal check, but insisted on an endowment model that would sustain scholarships, therapy, and college stipends long after his touring days end. Benefit concerts filled part of the gap; private donors quietly covered the rest. Today, a bronze plaque near the future community center bears seventy-three surnames, etched without donation amounts—a Jackson requirement to keep gratitude even.
A design stitched to lyrics
Architects leaned heavily on Alan’s music for atmosphere cues. The cottages echo the front-porch lines of “Livin’ on Love,” while the community center features wide windows and weathered pine beams reminiscent of the video set for “Remember When.” Inside each house, bunkbeds are arranged so siblings can talk across the room after lights out—an intentional response to the court-ordered separations that first motivated the project.
On the western ridge, workers prep the foundation for a tiny amphitheater—just a semicircle of benches with buried power conduits for a PA. Jackson jokes it’s so the next generation of kids can “crank bad karaoke at sunset,” but the project manager admits the singer already asked about installing stage lights. “He wants the village to have its own Friday-night talent shows,” she says. “He thinks every kid deserves applause that isn’t tied to a report card.”
Community, not charity
When word of Haven Hollow leaked last winter, social-media skeptics predicted another celebrity vanity project. But local caseworkers say the Jacksons’ plan fills a rare policy gap. Tennessee averages 8,000 children in foster care at any time; roughly 42 percent arrive with at least one sibling, but only 19 percent remain housed together. “The trauma of separation compounds everything else,” explains social-worker Carla Nguyen, who helped shape intake guidelines. “Haven Hollow won’t fix the statewide shortage of foster families, but it proves siblings can stay under one roof without warehousing them.”
To preserve dignity, no plaques will mark cottage doors, no press releases will name the first residents. Parents who eventually reunite with their children may volunteer as mentors; those who cannot will still receive weekend-visitation support on site. “We’re not in the business of pulling people apart,” Denise says, “we’re in the business of keeping what’s left of a family intact.”
A song still searching for its last note
Jackson’s touring future remains uncertain as Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease progresses, but he’s determined to perform one more benefit show on the village lawn the day the gates open. Set lists already circulate among bandmates, heavy on “Small Town Southern Man” and “Drive (For Daddy Gene).” Asked what he’ll say to the first group of siblings who move in, the singer rubs the brim of his hat and smiles. “Probably the same thing I tell my own grandkids—welcome home, and don’t track mud across Denise’s clean floors.”
Dusk settles over the hillside, painting scaffolding in gold light. For almost twenty years the Jacksons carried this project like an unfinished chord. Tonight, as the last crew truck pulls away and the first porch lights flicker on, the chord finally resolves—quiet, sure, and perfectly in tune with a lifetime of songs about belonging.
