Ashford Hughes Sr. is the Executive Officer of Student Success and Opportunity for Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS).
The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee recognized Hughes as one of the 2025 Game Changers in Nashville. When we asked what it means to be a game changer, Hughes credits three people who influenced him the most and taught him how to be a change-leader: his grandmother, the late Rev. Bill Barnes, and the late Judge Richard Dinkins.
“Rev. Barnes really was the one who taught me, as his later book outlined, to love a city,” Hughes said. “What I learned from him is that you can’t just talk justice. You can’t just say you love a community. You have to be immensely connected and thrown in the community to love it, to understand the way that it moves, the way that it feels, the heartbeat of that city.”
Hughes was hired as a senior advisor under Mayor Megan Barry and was later appointed as Nashville’s chief diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) officer under Mayor David Briley. He continued his work under MNPS.
You are the Executive Officer of Student Success and Opportunity for Metro Nashville Public Schools. What do you do?
I work a lot with teachers and principal leaders, helping them identify ways that they can create the conditions and environments where students can be most successful. A lot of the work I lead with teachers and educators is around looking at things through a different lens at how we take the whole child into consideration as we embed our instructional practices.
For instance, how are we taking the child’s lived experience into consideration, his home environment, his culture, the things that he’s aware of, the things that make him happy? How do we bring all those things into the classroom setting so that we can increase engagement? We can increase a sense of belonging for our students, and we can get them to be the best person they can be?
I really help our educators, whether it’s through professional development, whether it’s through strategic leadership and partnership design, really working with them to look at the child from a holistic perspective to really focus on student strengths and student well-being.
Another portion of my role within the district is to be a liaison for Dr. Battle in working with community leaders. We meet with several key community groups within the African-American community, the Hispanic and Latino community, the Muslim community, the faith-based community, the community that represents students with disabilities, and I serve as the liaison to ensure that we’re building trusting, transparent relationships in the effort that we can hear from them, that we take into consideration and acknowledge what their community and their children are going through. We do our best to ensure that when they come into the classroom, we’re able to give them all the support they need.
Another part of my work is focused on the school option side of things, the lottery process. How do I ensure that we’re opening ourselves up to be a welcoming district that provides plenty of opportunities for students and families to choose a multitude of schools that they can go to. So I am making certain that the way that we articulate the opportunities for our students is spread out across language, across economics, so that everybody understands they have choices within our school district.
But what I would say that I am the most proud of is when I am connecting with our young people. Myself and my team, we really focus on cultivating student voice, asking students about what they want their educational experience to look, to feel and to be like, so that we can work with our educators to bridge that gap of awareness and understanding. We’re really working with our students to help them understand the power within their voice, the responsibility to express themselves, and the responsibility they have to be the best versions of themselves. [We ensure] they know that they’re supported every step of the way.
So that’s kind of a long view, but really, if I could put it into one or two words, it’s about creating and having our people, our educators and our students, focus on the possibilities that exist in education and not always focus on the problems. And those possibilities are wrapped around creating positive, caring spaces and environments and conditions by which every student can thrive.
What were some examples of changes that were made because of that direct engagement with students?
One of the best outcomes is when teachers can start to understand what the students are going through at home. One key example is through our Muslim community during their holy season. A lot of our Muslim students were saying that there were some schools where they worked with teachers to get an understanding for the teachers when they were fasting and why they may not always be energetic during that time. And they didn’t have space to necessarily go and pray. So we began with that understanding and worked with our teachers and the American Muslim Advisory Council to think about ways by which we can articulate better to our teachers and educators the need during this holy season when students are fasting, the need to not only offer them some empathy and grace and trying to understand what they’re going through but also identify designated locations that they can go and pray.
You co-chair My Brother’s Keeper Nashville. What is the importance of My Brother’s Keeper Nashville and what’s its impact?
My Brother’s Keeper is important because we work with young males, black, African American, other males of color … to create a holistic environment where these students and these young people have what they need to thrive and be successful. My Brother’s Keeper is an opportunity. [In] a world where the images and depictions of black and brown men [has] oftentimes been historically negative, we are working to shift that narrative within the hearts and minds of our young males in the effort to get them to see, again, you have limitless possibilities.
Don’t focus on what people say your problems are or the problems or challenges that you may even face. Think about your possibilities of greatness and excellence that live within you.
This is a timely movement now, as we see men in general not attending college as much. We see men in general who are struggling with employment, they’re struggling with mental well-being and mental health issues.
We work with young males, particularly with students in the school system who are probably about 10 to 21 years old, getting them prepped and ready to be reading at grade level, ensuring that they’re high school graduation ready, ensuring that they have social and emotional intelligence and support, and then ensuring that they’re college ready, life skills ready, and ready to enter the workforce. We want these young boys to understand their power, and we want them to enact it in a way that’s going to benefit themselves, their family, and our communities.
How do you select participants and about how many young men are involved?
We have a couple of programs. One is called “I Read, I Lead.” We started that at the onset of COVID. We wanted to find a way that we could get books in the hands of our elementary school boys but also model to them black and brown males reading. So right now, we’re in about five or six different elementary schools. Each elementary school that we’re in, there are around 30-35 kids in the program. Educators help us select the kids.
We have a second program called the “King and Me.” It is for our middle school and high school boys. We run that program one Saturday out of the month for around three and a half hours. We fluctuate between 30 and 50 young men, and we really are sitting down and addressing everyday life skills and what it means to be a leader.
Those are our two mainstay programs. We have an annual summit where we bring all of our students together. That’s been averaging around 325-350 young people in grades six through 12. So we have access at any point in time to around 400 young people. The important thing about My Brother’s Keeper and our connection with kids is that we partner with other organizations that also have these programs, for instance, Backfield in Motion [or] Transformation Life Center. So we have within this city around 1,000-2,000 males whose lives we can touch and to whom we have access at any given time, giving them these positive messages.
You recently expressed on social media your concern about the increase in visible homelessness among “Black men, especially young men” who “are showing to be unhoused and struggling with visible mental health challenges.” An increasing phenomenon you have observed not only in Nashville but in cities across the nation. What, in your opinion, could help stem this tide?
First, as a community, we need to have an acknowledgement and a recognition that this is happening, right? I think some people see it but kind of look away.
I know we really, as a city and as a country, haven’t progressed our conversation around the unhoused, around the issues. Particularly within our African American community, this is a conversation that we are not having. And if we’re having it, we’re having it in isolated small pockets, in my opinion. So first thing is awareness and acknowledgement and not just talking about it, but having a deep and broad, nuanced conversation about what this means for our families and communities.
I think some of the root causes are economic issues that are facing men, particularly black men, right now over the last couple of years. I think there’s a lot of, in some areas, substance abuse at an early age. I think there’s a lot of trauma in families that has caused this to happen. And even though we’ve had pockets of conversation around this, we haven’t really had holistic, value-driven understanding and awareness around how these issues are affecting us now. We also have to really take a look at the impact that COVID had, the impact of isolation of individuals that may have already been isolated.
When I turn to myself and I say, “Well, Ashford, what can you do to influence some change? Where would I start?” I think one, it is really to take a look at the economic opportunities for our men in this community and not just to work a job, but what gives them economic independence? What can they do to earn a living wage in this city? I think when I see the younger men I ask myself, what opportunities were they provided in the education system? Did we do our best to ensure that they were graduation-ready? And when they graduated, were we able to give them an outlook, whether it was a skilled trade, to join the labor union to earn a living wage? Was it an opportunity if they wanted to go into the military to do that? So, I think about the economic opportunity really tied to education.
And then I think about the many communities that are continuing to be under-resourced. And by that I mean lack of resources and finances for healthy food. If you look in the J.C. Napier area, there is no grocery store within a three- to five-mile radius. If you only go to the gas station or you go to a tobacco outlet to get your food, I guarantee you aren’t getting fresh fruit and vegetables. If your body and your mind aren’t healthy because of the foods you’re eating, it’s going to transpire into your physical and your mental health.
I also think, again, what are we doing for the unhoused? In a land that is as wealthy as we are, we still cannot get the housing situation situated for our community members. When the economics impacts men, black men particularly, and they can’t provide for their families, some turn to substance abuse, and some don’t know where to turn. You see a lot of black men leaving the church, I think we have to take our ministry to the streets again and identify what’s going on and why this is happening.
It has to start with a more nuanced conversation at the top. And also has to include those that are unhoused, that are experiencing these things, in the conversation to make it better. We have all that we need right now to address this issue. And for some reason, we aren’t having nuanced conversations.