DALLAS (AURN News) — Two months into her historic role as the first executive director of Public Media Women in Leadership (PMWL), Aishah Rashied Hyman is already transforming how PBS and NPR stations approach diversity in both leadership and audience engagement. “When I found public media, I felt like I found the planet that I was supposed to be on professionally,” says Rashied Hyman. “But it wasn’t perfect. There were still challenges.”
Those challenges include a leadership landscape that hasn’t always reflected America’s diversity. But data supports change, she argues: “When women are leading, the conversations are more inclusive, there’s more engagement, there’s more mentoring and nurturing of that next generation.”
Her approach stems from PMWL’s boot camp program, which she credits with changing her own career trajectory. “What I realized through the program is that there weren’t any insurmountable barriers other than just my own mind. My mindset was the biggest barrier to my professional advancement in public media,” she told AURN News.
Now she’s focused on creating similar opportunities for others. “When I see the spark in a young person, particularly young women of color, I see myself in them. And I want to make sure everybody gets pulled up,” she says. “I want that spark to become a huge flame, so that they can go on and do great things.”
Under her leadership at various stations, including her recent role as Senior Vice President of Development at KERA, Rashied Hyman’s leadership generated more than $200 million from diverse audiences over two decades. At the same time, Rashied Hyman has consistently pushed for systemic change in how public media operates and who it serves. She was a founding member of Public Media For All, a diverse coalition of public media workers, led by people of color, advocating for more diversity, equity and inclusion in the industry.
“It’s not enough for us to have diverse storytellers and diverse staff working inside of public television and radio stations,” she explains. “We need the people who support public media to represent our communities across the country as well, because investment from donors has the biggest impact on our ability to tell the stories of our diverse community. The collective input from our supporters impacts whose stories we tell, who produces the content, what stays on the air.”
She also points to her successful initiative at Georgia Public Broadcasting, where partnerships with organizations like African Ancestry.com opened new pathways for community engagement. “People in our community were telling us that they didn’t feel like we were asking them to get involved. They didn’t feel like they were invited to the table when it came to giving and supporting public media.”
Rashied Hyman is equally focused on transforming content creation and programming. “The days of one or two people at a station or at a network deciding what a potential audience might want to see… that’s just a really antiquated approach,” she says. “We’ve got to engage our audience, really our community, as storytellers, as content creators and as programmers.”
Her mission is deeply rooted in public media’s founding principles. “It was absolutely created for underserved communities,” she says. “That’s why it was invented in the first place. That’s what the Public Broadcasting Act was all about. If you go back and read it, that’s exactly what it says.”
The impact of representation remains central to her vision. Speaking of her own experience wearing natural hair and traditional African clothing on air, she recalls: “Little girls would come up to me and say, ‘Oh, that’s the lady with the real black hair and the black name.’ There was something about not just me being a black woman on television, but the way I was showing up as my authentic self.”
For the future of public media, her vision is clear: “We live in a country that is extremely diverse… So the audience, the people who are consuming television and radio and podcasts and all the different forms of content, this is a very young, vibrant and diverse audience. In order for public media to thrive and to survive, we’ve got to be speaking to the folks who are looking for content.”
Her appointment at PMWL represents more than just a career milestone, it’s a fulfillment of her personal love and appreciation for public broadcasting. For her, it’s helping to blaze trails for young leaders to continue to make a positive mark on the world. “That’s what public media is here to do,” she says, “is tell all of our stories, and that’s what’s ahead of us.”
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