Ideas

Community Science’s Storytelling Spotlight is a space where we sit in conversation with clients, partners, and community leaders to illustrate how collaborative learning and evaluation can support mission-driven organizations in navigating complexity, grounding strategy in community, and advancing equity. We share these stories to spark reflection and offer insight for nonprofits and foundations facing similar questions about how to lead, learn, and adapt with intention.

This interview marks Part 1 of a two-part Storytelling Spotlight featuring Dr. Ereka R. Williams, Vice President of Education at Dogwood Health Trust. In this conversation, Dr. Williams reflects on Dogwood’s early evolution as a place-based funder in Western North Carolina, her leadership approach during a period of uncertainty and disruption, and the role that learning and evaluation have played in shaping strategy, alignment, and decisionmaking. She speaks candidly about why equity must serve as a prism for evaluation, the importance of starting with assessment in mind, and what it means to partner with an evaluation team that sits beside community rather than over the work.

Dr. Williams brings more than 20 years of teaching, scholarship, and leadership to her role at Dogwood, where she focuses on expanding educational opportunity for communities that have been historically underserved. Before Dogwood, she held senior academic leadership roles at Winston-Salem State University and Fayetteville State University, leading major curriculum, partnership, and quality assurance initiatives. She has coached, researched, and spoken nationally on equity, diversity, assessment, and leadership, and earned her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Part 2 of this Storytelling Spotlight will turn to Dr. Williams’ forthcoming book chapter, “They Belong to Each of Us: Unpacking Rurality, Responsibility, and Relationships in Philanthropy,” which appears in the upcoming volume Centering Diversity in Transformative Rural Education. That conversation will build on themes introduced here, including place, responsibility, and relational practice, while more deeply exploring how rural contexts are often misunderstood and what it means for philanthropy to show up with humility, accountability, and care.

Together, these conversations offer a layered view of leadership, learning, and evaluation as relational practices, grounded in place and guided by community.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Faith Garnett: Dogwood Health Trust emerged as a new place-based funder just before a period of significant disruption, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic. As the organization was still clarifying its role and responsibilities in Western North Carolina, what challenge or opportunity led you to seek out Community Science as a learning and evaluation partner?

Dr. Ereka Williams: I started at Dogwood in the fall of 2021, literally on November 1. Within my first few weeks, I learned that our four priority areas — housing, economic opportunity, education, and health and wellness — had already begun working with an external consultant to define goals and objectives. That made sense, given that Dogwood was still less than two years old at the time, but it also meant that things were moving quickly. By December, we were expected to issue primary goals for the education portfolio.

From the outset, I was very clear that any initiative we launched in service of those goals needed to start with evaluation and assessment in mind. My background is in the social sciences, and I am very much a data person. I believe deeply in beginning with the end in mind. Just as importantly, equity had to be the prism through which this work was designed. Any initiative attached to education needs to be equity-centered, not peripheral to equity.

At that time, Dogwood did not yet have a learning and evaluation unit. It would be more than a year before a dedicated person or team was in place, and I could not wait for that. With leadership’s support, I was given permission to bring in an external evaluator. Coming from higher education into philanthropy, I asked for recommendations, and Community Science was immediately named.

What stood out to me was their deep commitment to equity and their community-centered approach. Community Science does not sit above or outside the work; they sit beside partners. They are deeply embedded, focused on community voice, and uninterested in extractive evaluation practices or narratives that are not grounded in lived experience. Those were the variables that mattered most to me, and they aligned precisely with what we needed in that moment.

Faith Garnett: You were very clear about what you were looking for in an evaluation partner and why you needed it. How did that clarity shape your leadership at the foundation, particularly in aligning people around a shared strategy or direction? In what ways did the evaluation partnership support you in that role?

Dr. Williams: Initially, our work with Community Science focused on a single, major initiative: the early childhood education workforce. From the very beginning, their team brought a deep listening mindset. They took our stated goals — what I often think of as the constellation of stars on paper — and helped translate them into something cohesive, grounded, and defensible.

I was clear that foundational research, particularly the Starting with Equity report led by Dr. Iheoma Iruka, needed to serve as a filter for how we approached this work. I was also clear about embedding those commitments into our RFPs. What I was less clear about, and where Community Science was invaluable, was how to pull all of those pieces together into a strategy that was truly responsive to community needs and the moment we were in.

At that time, there was growing national recognition of the importance of the childcare workforce. We had an opportunity to act, but it needed to be right-sized for Western North Carolina and rooted in equity. Community Science helped me synthesize the inputs, clarify the narrative, and package the work in a way that I could bring to the board and organizational leadership with confidence.

I am not certain we would have achieved the same level of early alignment or momentum without that support. Community Science served as a thought partner, a refiner of ideas, and a source of clarity. They asked hard questions, probed assumptions, and helped us refine our approach in real time.

Just as importantly, their depth of experience in philanthropy helped me bridge my background in higher education with the realities of this sector. They ensured I was not operating solely through an academic lens, but through one that aligned with philanthropic practice and community accountability. That partnership was essential in helping me build confidence internally and externally that this work was both necessary and worth pursuing.

Faith Garnett: For other place-based funders, particularly those working in rural communities, what would you want them to understand about how learning and evaluation partnerships can work together to support effective, community-responsive strategy?

Dr. Williams: One of the most important things is creating space for calibration. One of the gifts of working with Community Science has been the way they sit deeply with both the funder and community partners. They listen carefully, then come back in a feedback loop that helps us reflect on what we’re hearing and decide how to respond.

That process has been iterative and ongoing. It has helped us ask hard questions. Is this something within our scope? Is this aligned with our end game? Is this the right moment, or does it require redesign? That kind of calibration has been essential to refining our strategy in a way that matches community realities, not just funder intent.

What I have appreciated most is that the partnership has never felt like pushing Dogwood’s agenda forward at all costs. Instead, Community Science helped us clarify where we thought we wanted to go, surface moments of dissonance, and then return to the work with greater alignment and responsiveness. Sometimes that meant staying on the original path, and sometimes it meant adjusting it. I would hope that a place-based funder is not moving at the speed of light simply because they have set a 2030 or 2035 goal on their website or embedded it in a performance management objective, without sitting still with community. When funder-driven timelines begin to override community realities, something is off. Learning and evaluation should slow that impulse down. They should help funders check themselves and ensure they are using the strengths of their learning and evaluation partners fully and responsibly, for the sake of the community.