2026 Tzedek Brilliance Awards: Celebrate the Impact of Asheville Changemakers

Matthew’s pursuit of progress for his people and hometown was relentless and strategic. Rather than accept the limits imposed by segregation, he studied how local power worked, built relationships across racial lines, and steadily pressed for change. At the Asheville Chamber of Commerce, where he began working in 1956, he improved employment opportunities for Black residents and persuaded a large bank to lend to Black-owned businesses.

In 1959, Matthew convinced the owner of Star Lanes Bowling Center to let Black residents bowl on Sundays. When white customers asked to join, he welcomed them despite instructions to maintain segregation. As a result, Star Lanes became Buncombe County’s first integrated, privately owned public accommodation. This breakthrough prompted other business leaders to seek his guidance on desegregation.

In 1968, he initiated the Committee for Progress, bringing Black and white business leaders together to improve race relations and economic conditions. He also helped establish AFRAM, a manufacturer of protective garments, where he served as general manager before assuming ownership. Under his direction, AFRAM grew into Asheville’s largest Black-owned business. More than an entrepreneurial success, it represented Black economic self-determination in a city where those possibilities had long been constrained.

His advocacy reached state and national leaders. Matthew served on North Carolina’s first Minority Business Development Committee in 1969 and was appointed the first Black member of the state’s Economic Development Board in 1977. He promoted Black job creation at the White House under Presidents Nixon and Carter. 

Back home, Matthew invested decades in organizing and sustaining the Skyview Open, America’s oldest Black-owned and operated golf tournament. Today, as president of the Skyview Golf Association and an active presence in local community life, he remains a keeper of Asheville’s living history. His legacy continues to fuel Black futures.

Thank you so very much for giving me this opportunity. There’s hardly a day that come that I’m not talking to some Black persons and white people about what ought to be going forward and what will not be if we don’t change our way of working together. We need a different thinking and operating, not only in Asheville, but across the country.

Matthew Bacoate Jr.

Paulina served as manager of the Buncombe County Family Justice Center and worked in the City of Asheville’s Office of Equity and Inclusion, reinforcing her understanding that meaningful change requires more than policies and programs; it also requires examining how systems of oppression operate within individuals, regardless of identity or intention. These experiences ultimately contributed to her decision to pursue clinical work as another way to engage the relationship between individual healing and collective liberation.

At the heart of Paulina’s work is the understanding that healing and justice are inseparable. Drawing on ancestral wisdom and lived experience, she has challenged mental health approaches that separate people from their communities, cultures, and identities, while championing healing that honors these connections and embraces the fullness of who people are, individually and collectively.

In response to the growing impacts of immigration enforcement, Paulina led the development of a community-based healing justice response. Through relationships with community members and organizers, she brought together a multidisciplinary network of practitioners to expand access to culturally responsive care. Together, they developed an approach rooted in shared knowledge, trust, and collective responsibility.

Through collaborations with Cornbread & Roses and Operation Gateway, Paulina has helped expand access to mental health support for rural 2SLGBTQIA+ communities and people navigating reentry after incarceration and recovery. As a facilitator for WNC Health Network‘s View From Here initiative, she helped reshape community listening sessions to better include Spanish-speaking participants, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, and women.

Central to Paulina’s philosophy is decolonization as a process of remembering, reconnecting, and creating. Grateful for her ancestors, teachers, family, loved ones, and communities, she understands her work as part of something much larger than herself. For Paulina, liberation is about more than freedom from oppression: it is also the freedom to experience the fullness of being alive. Because people deserve more than survival.

This award feels like the most beautiful present. I am so incredibly grateful and humbled. I really didn’t do this alone; none of this happens alone. It happens through relationship with community. It happens through relationship with yourself. It happens through relationships with the people who got you here. So truly, thank you for this acknowledgment.

Paulina Mendez