Field note 001 Nashville & Middle Tennessee
We are a Nashville nonprofit run entirely by volunteers. We help people with melanoma take hold of their own case — gathering your records, using AI to make sense of them, and walking into every appointment prepared. We also run free skin checks and help with the costs insurance leaves behind.
What we do
We would rather do a few things properly than many things thinly. AI runs through all of it — not to make decisions, but to do the organizing and explaining that nobody has time for. Everything below happens here, in Middle Tennessee.
The part nobody prepares you for. We help you gather everything you accumulate — scans, images, blood work, reports — into one place you control, then use AI to explain what it says and what to ask next. And to bring your own people in to help carry it.
Free skin checks with volunteer dermatologists. And for anyone already treated, the harder job: knowing what follow-up you are owed and making sure it actually happens. That is where the system loses people.
Needs-based help with what insurance does not cover: getting to treatment, staying near it, co-pays, medication gaps, and income lost while you are in care.
Just diagnosed
A melanoma diagnosis arrives with a hundred questions and no map. Call or write and a volunteer will get back to you. We will not ask you to explain yourself twice.
The Ranger Record
Cancer care is many specialists and no single owner. Scans, images, blood work, pathology, notes — each piece lives with whoever ordered it, and the only person present for all of it is you. We help you gather it into one place you control, understand what it says, and bring your own people in to help. When the stakes are this high, the answers you get are only as good as the record behind them.
Free skin checks
We organize and pay for free skin cancer screening events staffed by volunteer licensed dermatologists. We are not a medical provider — the dermatologists provide the care, and we get everything else out of the way.
Free. No insurance required. No one is turned away.
Screening days run on donated clinical hours. If you practice dermatology in Middle Tennessee and can give us a morning, that is the single most useful thing anyone can give this organization.
Volunteer your hoursOur story
Tony Rose is a Nashville native. He has spent his life here, and a good part of this city knows him.
In February 2026 he was diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma. He is in treatment, and he is doing well.
What he learned early is that the hardest parts of this are often not the medical ones. They are the logistics, the money, and not knowing what comes next — and they land hardest on people who do not have a room full of friends making calls for them.
So Tony started the Rangers, with a group of his friends, while he was still in the middle of it himself. The name is the point. A ranger knows the ground and walks it with you.
The hardest parts of a cancer diagnosis are rarely the medical ones. They are the logistics, the money, and not knowing what comes next.
Who we are
The Tony Rose Rangers is a Tennessee nonprofit public benefit corporation and a 501(c)(3) public charity. Nobody here is paid — not the directors, not the officers, nobody.
Give
We have no payroll, no office, and no paid fundraisers. What we raise pays dermatologists' costs for screening days and goes directly to people in treatment — for gas, hotel rooms, co-pays, prescriptions, and rent that came due during a month somebody could not work.
Funds raised here stay here. Every dollar is spent on someone in Middle Tennessee.
Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent the law allows. You will get a written acknowledgment for any gift of $250 or more.