While most students spend lunchtime taking a brain break, Niamh Manning, a junior at Hume-Fogg Academic High School in Nashville, often uses hers to hold meetings for her school’s chapter of Students Demand Action, a gun violence prevention organization. During classes, she finds moments to tell peers about upcoming events hosted by The State of the Students Tennessee, another group she helps run, which takes a bipartisan approach to helping teens get involved in organizing across a range of issues.
Alongside her busy student life, Niamh is an advocate for social causes that directly affect Tennessee students, like school safety from firearms, education, and immigration rights. Some of that work—like rallies she helps host—aligns with values more commonly held by Democrats. “It’s sometimes difficult, when you’re working with political issues, not to learn one way or another,” she said. But uniting with people across the political spectrum wherever humanly possible is important to her, and she does it a lot.
While student activism, especially on issues like gun violence, is often seen as a form of bleeding-heart “wokism,” Niamh is changing that. Because at the end of the day, she wants to speak up for all students across political identities—and help them use their voices, too.
Keeping students safe from gun violence is at the heart of Niamh’s advocacy. Firearms are the leading cause of death for U.S. children, and school shootings are on the rise. There were 83 incidents in 2024, according to CNN—a record since at least 2008—and 64 so far in 2025, as of late October. This danger became all too real for her in March 2023, when a shooter killed three children and three adult employees at the Covenant School, where both of Niamh’s siblings were students and where she attended elementary school. “That was something that really had a large impact on my life,” she said.
Seeing what she called the lack of action to protect students from shootings like this one put her advocacy in motion. Her freshman year at Hume-Fogg, Niamh got involved with Students Demand Action. Now in her junior year, she’s co-president of the group and also co-organizes The State of the Students.
In her gun violence prevention work with Students Demand Action, Niamh saw an opportunity to push back against the partisan divide that often emerges on the issue. She said, “We work with people of all backgrounds. I really want to make our focus…that we are united against an issue affecting all Americans, all Tennesseans, and it’s not just a face-off of one party versus another.” That approach infuses the club, which is open to all students, regardless of party affiliation. When the group writes letters to lawmakers raising student concerns about school safety, they write to Democrats and Republicans alike. They also collaborate with Republican activists in the community, like the mothers of students who lived through the Covenant School shooting.
One of those mothers, Melissa Alexander, features in a documentary Niamh produced to explore reactions to the shooting by advocates across the political spectrum. The film, which was a personal project and took home third prize in a CSPAN contest, intentionally “took a bipartisan perspective,” Niamh said, because she feels it’s important to share stories that show cross-party unity on the issue.
Unity is something she focuses on through The State of the Students, too. The club exists to help students become advocates, and does so by highlighting upcoming rallies and events on its Instagram, and by helping students plan events for their own causes. (They write on Instagram that even if those causes are not aligned with their own values, they will still share resources related to advocacy training.) Last school year, a student approached them with an idea for a rally on student immigration and education rights, in response to President Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education and attempts by ICE enforcement officers to enter schools. The club helped pull off the event by bringing in partner organizations and helping create a lineup of student speakers.
The group also hosts events its own members dream up, like a virtual town hall this September. The student leaders hoped to send a message about the importance of open community forums to Andy Ogles, the Republican U.S. Representative for Tennessee’s fifth district, who hadn’t held an open town hall since he was elected in 2023. The club chose three student panelists from different political backgrounds to moderate the discussion and identify issues of importance to all students in the region.
As fall shifts to winter, it’s a busy time for Niamh. In addition to her classes, one of her extracurriculars is ramping up: She’s the stage manager for Hume-Fogg theatre, and they’re putting on the musical, “Anything Goes,” in early November. Niamh’s advocacy work isn’t slowing down either. Students Demand Action will next be working to get safe storage legislation passed and support mid-term election candidates who prioritize gun safety. The State of the Students, meanwhile, is going to turn the insights from the bipartisan town hall into a letter they’ll send to Representative Ogles’s office.
But Niamh doesn’t mind all the juggling. That’s because, she said, “What I do is stuff I’m really passionate about.”
The Nashville SUNN editorial team is excited to spotlight an extraordinary first student featured in this spotlight column, which will explore youth civic leadership in politics and far, far beyond. It takes courage to knit communities together and cross political divides; but if any generation can do it, it’s Gen Z. And if any city can do it, it’s our politically diverse and relentlessly creative Music City. Stay tuned for more.
