The People
Behind the Work.
Vuka is led by scholar-practitioners, advocates and strategists who have spent careers inside the communities and institutions they are working to transform.
Director
A Note from
Dr. Nikka Lemons
To the Partners, Leaders and Community Members Who Make This Work Possible,
I want to start with something I believe deeply, even when the evidence tests it: this country has not yet seen its greatness. Not because we lack talent, resources or ingenuity — but because we have never fully invested in all of it. That belief is what brought me to this work. Not outrage, though there is plenty of justification for it. What brought me here is a stubborn, research-backed conviction that the United States is operating well below its own potential, and that the communities we serve hold the knowledge and vision to help this country finally become what it has always promised to be.
Transcending race is not an idealistic aspiration. It is a practical and urgent necessity for building a functional economy, a humane society and a government capable of meeting the demands of the 21st century.
Structural racism is not only a moral crisis. It is an economic one. Citigroup estimated that racial discrimination in wages, housing, education and lending cost the U.S. economy $16 trillion over two decades alone. When a society organizes its institutions around the suppression of a significant portion of its population, it cannot optimize the full range of human capital it possesses. It cannot build the consumer base necessary to sustain a resilient economy. Thirty-seven million Americans live in poverty. An economy that excludes a third of its people is not a strong economy. It is a diminished one.
Five global disruptors — climate change, wealth inequality, hyper-urbanization, automation and pandemics — are compounding faster than single-issue policy can respond. Between 1960 and 2020, the life expectancy gap between the richest and poorest counties widened from 5 years to 20. Climate disaster recovery takes 14 years in low-income neighborhoods versus 4 in affluent ones. These are not parallel trends. They are interconnected accelerants. The communities absorbing their compounding weight are already developing the adaptive knowledge that institutions have failed to access. Vuka was built to close that gap.
Our Community Research Councils do not advise — they govern. We train community members as professional researchers because their cultural expertise and relational trust have genuine value. Every recommendation names a responsible actor, a timeline and a cost. Every report is freely accessible. We stay through implementation and measure success by policies changed and resources reallocated — not by publications produced. None of this is possible without partnership.
America has not yet seen its greatness. But it still can. The disruptors ahead are too large for a divided, underinvested system to navigate — but a United States that finally does the work of inclusion is a nation that has never actually existed yet. We have the opportunity to build it. I am deeply grateful for every partner willing to stand in that possibility with us.
Board of Directors
Vuka's board brings together decades of frontline expertise in education, philanthropy, data science and community psychology. Each member serves not because it is comfortable, but because they have seen what happens when rigorous research and genuine community power align.
Dr. Keisha Scarlett serves because she has seen what happens when systems are designed to sort rather than develop talent. Over 25 years, she has led transformational change across public, nonprofit and corporate sectors with a singular focus: ensuring that leadership, governance and operational systems reflect values of equity, justice and innovation. As former Superintendent of St. Louis Public Schools, she launched the Literacy for the Lou initiative, securing $10 million in funding for a citywide cross-sector collaboration. During her tenure leading academic strategy at Seattle Public Schools, she expanded public trust ratings by 17% within one year while implementing data infrastructure that redefined district success beyond compliance metrics.
She co-founded the Academy for Rising Educators — a nationally recognized "grow your own" teacher workforce model now replicated across multiple states — and established the Office of African American Male Achievement through research-based advocacy and systems design. Currently, she serves as Superintendent-in-Residence at the University of Washington's Leadership for Learning Program and as Co-Principal Investigator for the Spencer Foundation-funded Measures that Matter collaborative, which is reimagining public accountability systems around transparency, belonging and trust.
Dr. Scarlett's leadership philosophy is rooted in ancestral accountability: systems must be intentionally designed to reveal and develop talent, not gatekeep it. She has advised President Biden's Education Transition Team, served on the National Academies of Sciences committee that co-authored national guidance on K-12 school reopening, and is a published researcher whose work appears in Educational Researcher and Families, COVID, and Unequal Schooling in the US. She partners with organizations to develop policies and practices that foster inclusive leadership and create lasting impact measured in changed lives, not just completed reports.
At Vuka, Dr. Scarlett brings the intellectual rigor and systems-change credibility to ensure that our research frameworks meet the highest standards of both scholarly validity and practical impact. She is the Mary McLeod Bethune Legacy Award recipient, a Spencer Foundation Vision Grant Awardee and a Washington State Middle Level Principal of the Year — recognitions that reflect a career defined not by accolades but by the students and communities whose trajectories are measurably different because of her work.
Ada Williams Prince serves because capital is never neutral — it either reinforces existing power structures or disrupts them. Women-led organizations receive less than 2% of total philanthropic dollars despite serving communities that bear the heaviest burdens of systemic inequity. Prince refuses to treat this as inevitable. Over a decade at the intersection of advocacy, humanitarian response and equity-focused philanthropy, she has developed a clear-eyed understanding of why transformative change requires resources aligned with values, not just good intentions.
Her career spans the globe and the full arc of movement-building work. As a Senior Advocacy Officer at the Women's Refugee Commission, she represented the organization at the UN Secretariat and built coalitions across UNOCHA, UNFPA and UNIFEM. At OneAmerica, she directed federal, state and local policy advocacy with a specific focus on immigrant women and girls. Her seven years at Pivotal Ventures — Melinda French Gates' investment and incubation company — gave her mastery of the mechanics of large-scale philanthropic strategy and what it actually takes to shift resources toward underinvested communities at scale.
Prince specializes in designing innovative philanthropic and capital strategies that prioritize gender equity and community empowerment. She understands that marginalized communities do not lack solutions or capacity. They lack access to capital controlled by institutions that profit from their exclusion. Her mission is to foster sustainable and equitable development by leveraging impact philanthropy to address social inequities at their root.
At Vuka, she brings the philanthropic credibility and capital strategy expertise to translate our research into fundable, scalable impact. She partners with diverse stakeholders to create transformative solutions that shift power — not just redistribute charity.
Kim Logan serves because she is committed to dismantling the lie that data is objective. Her work centers on a liberatory approach to data that challenges the colonial extraction patterns that have weaponized information against racialized and minoritized communities for generations. Communities of color are 60% more likely to be excluded from datasets that inform policies affecting their lives. Logan's response is not to collect more data — it is to collect the right data and place it in the hands of those who need it most.
She has spent her career inside organizations at the forefront of data-driven education reform. As a Research Scientist at Bezos Academy, she leads all research and data collection for the organization, consistently turning findings into evidence-based recommendations that shift practice. In her years at TNTP, she created methodologies to engage community members as critical stakeholders at every step of the data design process — a commitment that runs as a through-line across every role she has held.
Logan brings deep technical expertise in Qualtrics, SQL, R, Tableau and Excel alongside an equally deep commitment to what those tools are actually for: surfacing the truths that institutions are most motivated to ignore. Her work increases leadership capacity to dismantle systemic inequities in both outcomes and experiences. She measures what counts, not just what is easy to measure.
At Vuka, Logan ensures that our research methodology is both technically rigorous and community accountable. Her identity as a Black woman in data science informs her understanding that diversity of thought is not a soft value — it is a determinant of what questions get asked and what findings become visible.
Niya Bealin Smallwood serves because she knows what happens when systems fail the most vulnerable. For over 15 years, she has worked at the intersection of psychology and social justice, specializing in comprehensive assessments for low-income communities and racial and ethnic minorities with disabilities. Children with disabilities in under-resourced communities are twice as likely to go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed compared to their affluent peers. Dr. Smallwood refuses to accept this reality — and has built a career proving that institutional rigors do not have to override institutional humanity.
As Supervisor of Psychological Services for Milwaukee Public Schools, she manages a team of 170+ school psychologists ensuring that state and federal compliance standards are met without becoming a substitute for genuine advocacy. She holds a Doctorate of Psychology (Psy.D.) from the APA-accredited Wisconsin School of Professional Psychology, an Education Specialist in School Psychology from NASP-accredited University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and licenses as both a psychologist and a professional counselor.
Her clinical experience spans inpatient behavioral health, community mental health, job training programs and crisis intervention — environments where the distance between policy and lived experience is most visible and most consequential. She has treated patients across the age spectrum, trained newly recruited school psychologists and contributed to school crisis response teams addressing trauma at the individual and systems level.
At Vuka, Dr. Smallwood brings a clinical lens to community research that cannot be taught in a methods course. Her work is grounded in a simple truth: every child and every community deserves access to interventions that actually work. She collaborates with educators, mental health professionals and community stakeholders at state and national levels because she understands that holistic support requires systemic partnerships.