Lonnell Matthews was first elected as Nashville’s Juvenile Court Clerk in 2018. In this role, he serves as the keeper of records for the Juvenile Court of Davidson County.
“That means that all legal documents that are filed for court are filed and processed in my office,” Matthews explained. “We schedule all dockets for the elected Juvenile Court judge and the appointed magistrates here at Juvenile Court. We staff each courtroom with a clerk to keep a record of what happens inside the courtroom. And we collect any fees [for the] Juvenile Court. Those are our state-mandated responsibilities.”
But serving as the Juvenile Court Clerk was not the first elected office he held in Davidson County. Matthews previously served as District 1 councilmember from 2007 to 2015, following in Brenda Gilmore’s footsteps after she was term-limited. He was only 27 years old, one of the youngest council members (the age requirement to be able to run for Metro Council is 25).
“I had recently moved back to the neighborhood I grew up in,” Matthews said, adding that after asking his parents and several of their neighborhood friends, he decided to run for office.
At that time, he had already been engaging with young people through several youth outreach programs at the YMCA where worked from 2001 to 2015 before serving in Megan Barry’s Administration when she was mayor.
“I started off as a program director and then moved my way up, and by the time I left I was the district director over all of the youth outreach programs for the YMCA of Middle Tennessee.”
What are some significant changes you have observed in the youth services arena in Davidson County over the last two decades?
Davidson County is fortunate because we have a very rich nonprofit community. We have a plethora of nonprofit programs — not just to address youth, but to address many issues that the citizens of this county face. But for youth in particular, there are a lot of programs that are serving youth in various capacities. Whether it’s before and after school programs, whether it’s intentional mentorship or mental health services and supports, whether it is job training or internship programs for young people, we have a great wealth of programs.
I’ve seen a change in the landscape over the last couple of decades. There is an increased coordinated effort where we aren’t duplicating services for the same group of youth or the same subsets of youth. We’re making sure that we’re building capacity and serving as many youth as we possibly can, and we’re building a strong infrastructure and network for youth to be able to engage with programming outside of home and school.
We still have a long way to go. I think there are plenty of opportunities as Nashville continues to grow, but we’re on the right track when it comes to serving our youth.
Are you involved in any of the youth safety programming that our local government has focused on in the last few years?
I am, and I won’t get too far ahead of Mayor O’Connell’s office on some things that we’re currently working on. [In the former council,] — there was a large effort to do some violence prevention work within the city. There was a lot of research on doing more preventative work rather than the responsive type of work we do here at court or through law enforcement.
The prevention work, I think, is really where the resources need to go. We need to do more to stop violent incidents from happening. We need to do more to make sure that young people are prepared with conflict resolution skills, that they’re able to communicate effectively with one another, that they’re able to understand emotional intelligence and where they are with social-emotional alignment, and we need to address adverse childhood experiences.
The Metro Council is working with Mayor O’Connell’s office on creating an Office of Youth Safety for Metro government. We’ll look to manage and coordinate a lot of that prevention work with young people and families in the communities to make sure that we’re stopping violent incidents from occurring before they even happen.
I’ve made myself available as a consultant and advisor to councilmember Delishia Porterfield who is leading the efforts from the Metro Council side, also to the Mayor’s Office which is trying to build out the scope of what that office is going to look like, and the Southern Movement Committee, which is the community group that has been advocating for it as well.
What are some of the biggest issues that you see youth and young adults struggling with in Davidson County?
First is to make sure that they have the opportunity to have a voice. Youth voice is something that a lot of advocates in the youth services arena push to make sure that young people have a platform, especially when conversations are happening that affect them, to ensure they are part of the solutions that are being cultivated within our community.
When youth get those opportunities, some of the issues they voice [include] their concern for safety. When we talk about safety, they specifically talk about their perspective of being able to use public transportation and feel safe about it. All of our public school students have a free bus pass that is included in their student ID. So, a lot of them have access to public transportation, but they don’t feel safe using it.
They also have been very vocal about affordability issues. They are very concerned about the cost of living, potential rise of poverty in Nashville, and homelessness has been one of the issues they have been very vocal about as young people. That is not an issue that’s foreign to them. They notice what is happening in the community. They see how affordability issues have bubbled up, and they don’t want to see the problem of poverty get out of hand in the city.
Traditionally, tokenism has been a barrier to truly engaging people who we intend to serve as equal partners in the decision-making process. How do you see decisionmakers trying to overcome tokenism?
One example — and this is actually happening across the country at different organizations — is that the [Nashville] school board has two student representatives. Now, they’re non-voting members because they were not elected, so they don’t get to actually vote. But they attend all meetings. They get to speak from the floor. They are included in the discussions, and they’re embraced by the elected board members to help lead some of the conversations about the direction that our public school district is heading in.
I see that type of inclusion happening with other youth services organizations and nonprofits that are having young people on their board of directors to make sure they [include] youth voices in their decisions and [in their conversations] about how they’re governing themselves as organizations. I realize this is a double-edged sword, but young people have also been able to take advantage of social media platforms to make sure they are able to voice their concerns and be heard by a larger audience that they probably ever had the ability to be in front of before.
So there is a lot more access for young people nowadays, but I think that our young people tend to meet the bars that we set for them as a community and step up to the plate when it counts. We just have to make sure that there are enough opportunities for them to have a sense of belonging and to engage in the community.
Talking about community engagement, you served as the Director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood and Community Engagement under Megan Barry. What do you view as critical community engagement efforts in Nashville right now?
Something that I’ve been paying close attention to, even during my time in the Barry administration, is the cost of living and wealth gap – not just in Davidson County but in all of Tennessee. The gap between poverty and what is considered comfortable [to live] in Tennessee is really growing. The middle class is shrinking and that’s very concerning to me. I really noticed it before the pandemic when we had very low unemployment, but we had a lot of under-employment. The jobs that they were getting, they probably were overqualified for, and the jobs were not paying living wages. There is not enough economic opportunity. On top of that, in Davidson County, the cost of living is going up while people are not making enough. That’s when you start to see that wealth gap increase.
That to me has become a community issue. Nashville is very unique, and we’re very fortunate because we have a lot of different communities with a lot of different [characteristics]. But in all of these communities, we need to think about what economic development looks like within the character of the community. And we need to make sure, as we continue to grow, that we think about the health of the community. We have to take a holistic look at how people live, work, play, and get educated in those communities, and how neighborhoods are being built to be complete neighborhoods so that people have the ability to grow up and age in place and not be pushed out at a certain point.
I think affordability has to drive that thinking as we think about how we’re developing as a city going forward.