Barbershops around Nashville are meeting community needs as health information hubs | Chattanooga Times Free Press

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At Urban Class barbershop in North Nashville, barber Rashad Donaldson's artwork covers the wood paneled and red walls. It feels more like your cool uncle's eclectic living room than a barbershop. There's a globe in one corner, board games and a bookshelf with a little bit of everything, from dictionaries to metaphysical Bibles. When it's warm, they host parties on the terrace outside.

"We call it a balcony social," Donaldson said.

Not everyone who spends time in the shop is a paying customer.

"We have people that come in just to say hi and have a conversation. They never get their hair cut, but they come and just, you know, they like the environment," he said. "It's a place of style. It's a place of class, a place of culture."

After visiting nearly a dozen barbers across Nashville, it's clear these shops are more than just a place to get your hair cut. They're community spaces, places where you might find yourself in a debate about pop culture.

Or talking about your health.

"They are like confidants," Dr. Aima Ahonkhai said. "That's part of the nature of the barbershop."

Ahokhai is an infectious disease specialist at Harvard, but she used to work at Vanderbilt Medical Center, where she cared for young Black men living with HIV.

"(They) presented in really late stages and ultimately went on hospice from the complications that they had from end stage HIV," she said. "And it was such a jarring experience to me, and it really bears out what we see with the southern U.S. having been much more impacted by HIV now than other regions."

Across the nation, Black individuals are six to seven times more likely to contract and die from HIV than people of other races, and one in 21 Black men will acquire HIV in their lifetime.

It was Ahonkhai's encounters with these young men, dying from a treatable illness because the health care system was failing to reach them, that made her want to try a different approach -- one that reached into communities more directly, and more often.

So, she reached out to Streetworks, an HIV/AIDS outreach organization, for ideas, and learned they were distributing condoms at barbershops around the city. She gathered some of the barbers together and proposed addressing HIV at their shops. Together, they launched the Cutting Out Stigma program in 2023 with a total of 52 barbers, half in Nashville and half in Memphis, where HIV is particularly prevalent. Shelby County has the second-highest rate of new infections in the country.

The barbers told her they'd need a few things to get started -- information and training about the illness, guidance on how to talk to clients about it.

"We were hearing all kinds of things about HIV, (like) 'I'd rather get shot than say I have HIV,' you know, really heavy reflections about the power of this diagnosis," Ahonkhai said. "But by the time we finished those initial conversations, we heard so much about HIV stigma that we realized, OK, maybe we need to step back and really focus on the stigma."

This is something that Nashville barber Steve Nelson has thought about a lot.

"At Narcotics Anonymous, it teaches us the stigma is the last thing to go," Nelson said. "I've been clean for 12 years, but in some people's eyes, I'm still a crack addict. Don't matter if I own houses, businesses, cars, all that stuff. Don't matter, because the stench of it, the stigma of it, supersedes and goes before whatever my gains are. So I understood stigma."

Overcoming that stigma is something he's brought into his practice as a barber. Nelson now owns Distinguished Gentleman barbershop on Nolensville Pike. He went through a lot to get to a place where he can help others.

"I got my parole certificate on the wall. The reason why is, I want those young men to know that I've went through something. They might ask me about it, then I can tell them about it, and then by me sharing my experience with it, maybe that's a road they won't go down," he said.

Nelson is one of the program's "barber investigators." He took 10 hours of training, had weekly and monthly calls with Ahonkhai and her team, and got certified as a community health worker through Vanderbilt. Nelson's goal in his shop is to move questions about HIV from the moral to the medical.

"My thing is to normalize getting tested, knowing your status, and if we can normalize that, then we broke the stigma, we've cut it," he said.

And Nelson thinks the barbershop is just the place to do that.

"The barbershop has always been like the Black social club," he said.

Having these conversations opens space to talk about men's mental health. Corey Robinson, owner of Executive Barber Lounge, said he connected with people through talking about his own struggles.

"I'm pretty much a vulnerable male. Men deal with mental health or depression, like, talk to somebody about it. Don't be embarrassed about it, because it's normal. All of us go through it," Robinson said. "And I think a lot of men, we're taught to be tough, not show any signs of weakness, and we just hold it in. For me, I'm open with how I talk about how I was depressed. I talk about me drinking too much. ... I let my flaws be shown."

Denford Galloway works for the Shelby County Health Department, and was an advisor to the program as someone living with HIV. His role was to share his story with the barbers and help them learn that anyone can get HIV. It was a long road that led to him to feel comfortable enough to share his story and help spread awareness about HIV. He went to therapy and learned that tending to your mental health is a big piece of this process.

"It hadn't always been me having the courage to stand before people and say, 'Hey, I'm HIV positive. I'm living with HIV,'" he said.

The intimacy of having one's hair cut and being seen by the person cutting your hair in itself can have a positive impact on a person's mental health. That's how mobile barber Nate King sees it.

"I had a lot of family members that had problems or things that they wouldn't normally talk about. But when I started cutting their hair, it changed the whole environment up," King said. "So it's like my connection to the world."

At the heart of King's work as a barber, and the Cutting Out Stigma program, is a desire to build people up and help them feel confident in themselves.

"I've found more and more power in it depending on how sincere your approach is. I've really honestly seen people feel seen again. It pours back into people when you cut hair and you help them remember who they are," he said. "It's all about being up to date with your health. You can teach somebody else and educate them within a community, because we're all connected. That's the whole thing."

This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.