Founder/CEO, Come Together Music Project | Thought Leader | Attorney | Facilitator | Public Speaker | Strategic Planner | Copywriter | Coalition Manager
Shaka Mitchell built a room where that gets proven, one song at a time.
Two lawyers sat down with Shaka Mitchell expecting to find little in common: different genders, hometowns, and politics, one law degree the only thing they shared. Mitchell asked for a song that reminded each of home, one for a hard day, one tied to justice. They traded songs and stories for an hour, then phone numbers. “The music was a gateway to expressing themselves,” Mitchell says, “and finding that they had views of justice that were much more aligned than at first blush.”
Shaka Mitchell is the founder and CEO of the Come Together Music Project, named to the Nashville Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 in 2017.
Why “Win or Lose” Is Usually the Wrong Frame
Mitchell’s core argument is that most disagreements are not fights over a fixed pie. “People stop listening to each other if they assume every decision is zero sum,” he says. Two decades spent inside one of the most contested corners of American public policy, education, gave him the room to test that claim against real stakes, not just rooms full of strangers swapping songs. That distinction, he argues, is what most people miss when they walk into a room assuming the other side wants to win at their expense.
The proof he points to first is legislative, not musical. As Tennessee State Director for the American Federation for Children, Mitchell worked to pass an Education Savings Account pilot program for low-income students in Nashville and Memphis, a law that both funded scholarships for private-school enrollment and added new funding for the public schools that lost students to it. More than 5,000 students now participate, and the pilot became the template for a statewide program that serves over 35,000. The 5,000 figure reflects current enrollment in the pilot; the 35,000 figure is the reported participation in the statewide program the pilot enabled. “We can shape policy in a way that benefits multiple stakeholders simultaneously,” Mitchell says. The bill’s opposing camps did not get a smaller version of what they wanted. Both got funding lines that had not existed before. That is the same logic that got a legislature to fund public schools it was also diverting money from, and it is the logic he now runs on strangers instead of statutes.
The Room, Not Just the Bill
The Come Together Music Project applies the same logic to people, not budgets. At each session, Mitchell sits down with guests who look, on paper, like they should have nothing to say to each other, a chef and an Olympian, a mayor and a musician, and asks them to answer a series of prompts with a song: one that reminds them of home, one from a hard day, one tied to hope. The group listens to the clip, then hears why the guest chose it. The mechanism is not debate. It is disclosure. Music pulls people back into a specific memory rather than a general opinion, which is where most disagreements actually live, and strangers form bonds quickly in that setting because they are experiencing real vulnerability rather than performing a position for an audience.
The project began during the pandemic, when Mitchell and a few friends started trading songs to stay connected as public discourse elsewhere was fraying. Fellows from his cohort at the Aspen Institute’s Civil Society Fellowship pushed him to build the informal swap into something larger, and Come Together Music Project incorporated as a nonprofit in 2025. Sessions typically run about an hour, and the guest list is deliberately mismatched by design, not incidentally so. What changes over the course of one session, Mitchell says, is not that strangers discover they agree on politics. It is that they stop treating each other as representatives of a side and start treating each other as people who happen to hold different views, which turns out to be a much smaller problem to solve. It is a small mechanism for a large claim, but Mitchell has now run it enough times to trust it. The pattern holds whether the guests are elected officials or people who have never spoken publicly at all. Mitchell does not claim the format erases disagreement. He argues it changes what a disagreement is standing on, which is enough to change how it ends.
What Leaders Can Steal From a Song Swap
Mitchell’s format works because it reverses the usual order of a difficult conversation: it asks people to share something personal before anyone is asked to state a position, and it costs nothing but a change in sequence. That single sequencing choice, personal history before opinion, is the entire mechanism, and it travels well outside a nonprofit built around music.
Leaders who want to steal it can start with four moves.
First, replace the icebreaker. Instead of asking a mixed group to introduce themselves by title or department, which reinforces the hierarchy already in the room, ask for a personal artifact tied to a shared prompt: a photo, a song, an object from home. Mitchell’s prompts work because they are universal (a song that reminds you of a parent, a song that gives you hope) rather than topical, which keeps the exercise from turning into a preview of the disagreement it is meant to prevent. This works in a ninety-minute all-hands the same way it works in a living room: the artifact only needs to be personal, not political.
Second, sequence disclosure before debate. Do not let the group move to the contested agenda item until each person has answered one personal prompt in front of the others. The order matters more than the content. Mitchell has watched strangers exchange phone numbers after an hour of trading songs and stories; the same group asked to open with the contested topic rarely gets there. It is a small rule, and it is the one that does the actual work.
Third, isolate what changed. Mitchell’s sessions do not resolve disagreements. They change how the room treats the person on the other side of one, from a representative of a position to a person who happens to hold it. A leader running this inside a team or a board should measure the same thing: not whether the vote changed, but whether the room started listening to the person casting it. That is a smaller, more measurable win than agreement, and a more honest one to promise a room.
Fourth, protect the sequence from shortcuts. The temptation in a busy organization is to skip the personal prompt and go straight to the agenda when time is short. Mitchell’s format only works because the order is non-negotiable; skip it once and the room reverts to positions instead of people.
None of this substitutes for the harder work of actually deciding a contested question. It only clears the ground it gets decided on. “Music sessions force us to listen to one another. And while listening we find common ground,” Mitchell says, and that is the wager behind the entire project: that most of what looks like a fixed fight has more room in it than the people fighting it assume.
Who Is Shaka Mitchell?
Shaka Mitchell is the founder and CEO of the Come Together Music Project, a Nashville, Tennessee nonprofit that uses music to build relationships across political, generational, and socio-economic lines, and a 2017 Nashville Business Journal 40 Under 40 honoree. He spent close to two decades inside American education policy before starting it, work he now treats as background rather than headline. “Even folks on opposing sides can agree on a lot,” he says, “but not if they view their counterpart as categorically different.”
Mitchell served as Tennessee State Director for the American Federation for Children, where he worked on the state’s Education Savings Account pilot program, and later as the organization’s Director of State Strategy and Advocacy; he remains a Senior Fellow there. Earlier, he held roles at LEAD Public Schools and Rocketship Education, both Nashville-based charter school organizations, and has taught political science at Belmont University as an adjunct professor since 2010. He holds a JD from Wake Forest University School of Law and maintains an active law license, through which he produces legal scholarship rather than taking clients. He also served on the Tennessee Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which published his 2019 report on legal financial obligations in the state’s criminal justice system.
He started the Come Together Music Project in May 2025, after a pandemic-era habit of trading songs with friends convinced him the exercise could scale beyond a small circle. What advocacy work never let him do, he says, is watch two people move from strangers to something closer to friends inside a single conversation. The lawyers who traded phone numbers after one session are, by his account, a fairly ordinary outcome now. The Come Together Music Project is built to make that the point, not the byproduct.
Shaka Mitchell is the founder and CEO of the Come Together Music Project, a Nashville, Tennessee nonprofit that uses music to build relationships across political, generational, and socio-economic lines, and a 2017 Nashville Business Journal 40 Under 40 honoree. To connect with Shaka or learn more, visit his LinkedIn profile.
