Ashley Bachelder did not expect that she would ever become the interim director of the Metro Arts Commission. After serving as the director of policy and research at the Metro Human Relations Commission for a little over two years, she took over the lead role at the Metro Arts Commission.
Bachelder’s background is in public health and community organizing. She taught at university medical centers in Arkansas and at Vanderbilt and led community organizing initiatives that promoted public transit, workers’ rights, tenant rights, affordable housing, and racial justice. Prior to starting with Metro government in September of 2022, she served as the co-director of Workers Dignity and then as the lead organizer for Showing Up for Racial Justice.
While Bacheder doesn’t currently work directly with housing efforts, she said she believes it’s one of Nashville’s most urgent issues.
“I don’t work in this space anymore, but I will likely always believe that access to safe and stable housing is the core of our ability to exist,” she says. “A person’s housing situation affects everything. It affects opportunities that you have. It affects your health. It affects your safety. It affects how you build community.”
Bachelder’s appointment to head up the Arts Commission in January 2025 came after a highly publicized breakdown in leadership at that department. The Metro Human Relations Commission (MHRC) is the agency that receives complaints about access to public services or discrimination. Near the end of 2023, Bachelder was assigned as MHRC’s lead investigator following a complaint against the Arts Commission about the distribution of grant funding.
Over the next months, she became extremely familiar with the Metro Arts Commissions and its processes, which made her a natural choice when the commission’s first interim director abruptly resigned this past January.
The commission has not officially started the search for a permanent director yet, but Bachelder said they were likely to bring in a new director in spring. At this point, she does not plan to throw her hat into the director-search ring.
How would you describe your leadership style, and where do you think you can make the biggest difference?
My style is strong in coaching and managing. I am strong in making an assessment in a situation or thinking through things as a system from an execution perspective. I am not a visionary leader. I don’t always enjoy being the person to set visions, speaking about that and rallying a crowd. I enjoy helping other people in their roles and helping them execute an idea.
What are the main goals for Metro Arts Commission during this interim directorship?
I’m sure you’re aware of at least the high-level turmoil that has gone on here in recent years.
A few years ago, Metro Arts, in good faith and in good policy, redesigned our grants program. One of our core functions is providing resources to arts organizations and to artists. Of course, our mission is about providing opportunities for every Nashvillian to have access to a creative life. We do that through a variety of ways, but one of the key ways is our grants program.
As a growing city, the art scene here in Nashville has been expanding and changing and shifting for years. Previous leadership before me did a lot of work in really thinking about how our resources are reaching folks who haven’t had access to these resources before. And so, some new priorities were set to distribute funds a little differently than they had been before [and] to distribute them to people who hadn’t had access to arts grants and arts opportunities before. That policy vision was developed through a participatory process, and I fully support that vision, but it wasn’t implemented well. A lot of the headlines over the last couple of years are about delays and payments not coming through, or payments being not the amounts that people expected.
When I came in, I knew that I wanted to continue to find ways to carry out this policy objective, which is spreading our resources to those who have traditionally not had access to them and finding ways to improve the operations. And so, my focus has really been on quality improvement and setting up systems. Because the thing that came with expanding access to these funds is this huge growth in our programs.
The Thrive grant has been talked a lot about through these changes that went from funding 22 artists one year to 101. And right now we have 275 applications. Now we’re working on processing how we support the increase in grantees, what do we need to do on the staff side in order to have a process that stays on time, that works, that delivers what we say that we’re going to deliver.
All of that to say, my focus has been on creating systems, improving communications, really knowing that public confidence and public trust in a process is being able to carry through on the operations of what we say we are going to do. And so, it’s very important to have public engagement through this process. I’ve tried to hold as many opportunities as possible to be super public and transparent about what we are doing. For my first two months in this job, I did a weekly drop-in at different public locations where people could come talk to me as the new director, whether it’s a compliment, a complaint, a question. We also did a number of listening sessions – report backs is what I call them. [And I wanted to narrate] what’s going on at Metro Arts over these last few months as we’ve got the grants back up and going, because there was that period of over a year where there was just nothing that was happening publicly with the grants.
I’ve also had a great opportunity to make some new hires on our team. We’ve got an amazing team, but I think that gets not shown enough because of all of the turmoil and all of the drama. But we’ve got really incredible people that are committed to this work on behalf of Metro.
How big is your team?
When we are fully staffed, we have 15 team members. And we are not fully staffed right now, but I expect to be by the end of the calendar year.
What’s your budget?
If you look in the Metro budget book, our annual operating budget is about $5.5 million. About $3.2 million of that is our grant budget every year. So about $2 million for staff and other operations.
You hold a graduate degree in public health. What made you choose that field and how did you end up with the Metro Human Relations Commission?
I grew up in a working-class family where access to healthcare was a big thing. My father worked in a factory. His father worked in a factory … and my mother worked at Walmart. … and access to health care, because of their jobs, was a big thing for us growing up. My parents eventually divorced, and they should have done it a lot sooner, but they didn’t because of access to health care. And so I always saw access to health care as a big through-line in my childhood.
So, I went into public health, but my focus has not been in healthcare. I actually expanded my view of health and how we create health in communities through my degree, but also my applied experiences.
Let me share a short story: When I was in my last year of graduate school, I was walking to class one day and somebody handed me a flyer and told me that my university was expanding and was going to knock down 250 houses around the university’s footprint, and this was a terrible thing. I ended up spending my graduate thesis on doing a whole thing around how displacement is about public health. That changed my public health trajectory, where I spent the next several years growing my knowledge about what is community organizing because the community actually fought back against my university and stopped the expansion. And actually, the neighborhood is still there 15 years later right now.
[I started] looking at community organizing as public health. And I’ve had this weird career trajectory where I’ve called myself a public health practitioner, but it has been through these social issues that we organize around, whether that’s been around transit rights, which I’ve done through work in Nashville, eviction prevention, or workers’ rights. So, it started for me as access to healthcare. It expanded to me as everything is public health, the social issues that we experience, and the inequities that we see in our communities.
I came to MHRC 15 years later, after that story that I just told, never ever expecting that I would come work for the local government because I’d call myself some days an organizer or an advocate or an agitator on the outside. But my phase of life changed, and I was looking for a different strategy.
I have always believed in the importance of inside-outside strategies. So for years I worked as somebody on the outside, but I know that we need people inside the systems that we’re trying to make work better. Thinking about Metro, it’s the system that we have the most control over, especially in these times that we’re living in.
I think being able to be part of the local government that has the closest and most direct impact on people’s lives is the space where we can make change if you can tolerate working inside the system. It’s frustrating to work in the system. At Metro Arts right now, I oversee a process where we distribute over $3 million to communities. That is how I am existing in our local system, trying to align values with my own values that I have, trying to be transparent, and trying to make the system work better for people.
We’ve talked about your background in community organizing. What wins in these areas would you like to highlight from the past few years? And what are the biggest challenges?
That’s a hard question. Thinking about when I was doing direct community organizing in these spaces feels like an entire lifetime ago these days. I’m more of an observer on this right now than an active participant.
But observing how these different groups that you named here — folks who are really focused on transportation issues like safe street issues, focused on housing and homelessness, focused on economic justice – the issue of surveillance has been one that’s brought a lot of these different groups together as we’ve seen the [Metro] Council debate different things like Fusus or license plate readers in the last couple of years. And I think right now, given the changes in levels of government that are above us, that are harder to impact, the way that we’re talking about issues at the local level is changing to reflect that.
There is coalition building happening right now that is ultimately going to serve all working-class people better when we think about the intersecting issues that affect folks. And so, in the last year, I think a community organizing win was the slowing down of the surveillance legislation that was being proposed and being more hesitant in how we think about some of those things that were being proposed for public safety and the intersectionality between social issues.
We know that from higher levels of government, we’re not likely to have increased resources. And I think at the local level, our focus has to be on maintaining as much as we can to allow people to live with dignity during these times where there might be fewer resources available. What can we do at the local level to not make things harder for folks? That’s our responsibility and our duty at the local level when we think about these resources and things like that.