Our Story
Acorn Evaluation, Inc., or simply “Acorn” , began in 2013. Our home office in San Diego, California is surrounded by oak trees and thousands of acorns. Inside each little tiny acorn is the potential of turning into a giant oak tree - just as the people we work with and the organizations they belong to have great potential for their own growth and greatness!
We were founded to help with something important.
Acorn serves hundreds of Early Head Start and Head Start (EHS/HS) recipient agencies and Community Action Agencies (CAP) throughout the country. These amazing programs provide high-quality, comprehensive services to communities and to children ages 0-5 and their families living at the poverty level, by receiving funding from the federal government's anti-poverty programs that have been in place since the 1960s.
This is "high-stakes" work requiring skilled leadership and advanced project organization and coordination, across separate but related content areas. At Acorn, we provide education and training, program assessment, and custom training and technical support to the leaders of these programs.
Our team is made up of patient, friendly, and experienced professionals with advanced expertise in organizational change and data literacy. We know how to join you and support your positive change efforts. You can trust us.
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Good Change.
Helping Head Start, Early Head Start, and Community Action Agencies nationwide improve their leadership, management, and data culture, one small, sustainable change at a time.
Management Team
Stuart Jones, M.A. (LinkedIn)
Partner, Chief Executive Officer, Founder
Stuart has spent over 20 years working as a professional evaluator and management consultant, primarily focusing on organizations that serve the early childhood community. In 2013 he founded Acorn Evaluation to further the goal of providing quality educational and consulting services to the Head Start/Early Head Start community.
Stuart's previous experience includes responsibility for large-scale process and outcomes evaluations of the California Department of Education, First 5 San Diego, San Diego County Office of Education, Rady Children's Hospital San Diego, and federal Even Start grant programs, focusing on early childhood education, family engagement, family literacy, developmental screening, smoking cessation, breastfeeding education, and access to healthcare.
As CEO of Acorn, Stuart works with senior leaders throughout the Head Start/Early Head Start field to champion best practices in data-driven implementation of continuous quality improvement. He is the lead instructor for The Academy at NHSA's Data Literacy Credential.
Greg Dixon, Ph. D. (LinkedIn)
Partner, Chief Learning Officer
Dr. Greg is the leading designer of professional development programs to build data literacy in Head Start. He brings two decades of experience as a professor and curriculum designer to the development of programs that make data fun and accessible to all.
Dr. Greg previously served as an award-winning professor and applied social scientist, as Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of West Georgia; Associate Director of Analytics Services at Murphy Center for Public Service; and a quantitative methods expert in the MPA and PhD Programs at Walden University.
As Chief Learning Officer of Acorn, Dr Greg is directly responsible for Acorn's educational offerings, serving as both curriculum expert and senior course designer. Thousands of Head Start/Early Head Start professionals nationwide have learned more about data literacy and using data in their programs from Dr. Greg's friendly, instructive videos, in both The Academy at NHSA's Data Literacy Credential, Data Basics, and Data Essentials, and in Acorn's own Data Analyst Certificate.