Community Engagement a Calling for United Way’s Zeke Stephenson
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On most evenings in Anderson, if there is a meeting about anything that might outlast the snacks—the school board, a literacy roundtable, a gathering on juvenile justice or mental health—you can find Zeke Stephenson in the room, tall and soft-spoken, listening as if the future of the county depended on whoever has the floor at that moment. He is officially the Director of Community Impact at the United Way of Anderson County, but the title misses the informality with which people, spotting him at the back of a council chamber or in the corner of a fellowship hall, wave him over as if he were a neighbor who also happens to know where every door in town leads.
Stephenson is from Rutherfordton, a small town in the foothills of western North Carolina that most people know, if they know it at all, as the place the highway briefly narrows on the way from the Upstate to the ski slopes near Boone. He calls Rutherfordton “foundational,” the kind of place where his parents, both natives, raised him and his brother in a First Baptist church whose doors he remembers as being open as regularly as the public schools where his father worked as a speech pathologist. Church and school blurred into a single civic education: spring-break trips to Gulfport, Mississippi, to put roofs on houses damaged by Hurricane Katrina, summer projects around the country, and small, habitual acts of service in a town that, as he tells it, seemed to organize itself around the question of who needed help that week.
At Gardner-Webb University, in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, he declared psychology because he “really liked to help people,” imagining a career in the mental-health field before the syllabus made clear that graduate school would be a requirement rather than an option. The pivot, when it came, arrived not in a classroom but over dinner with his youth minister and the minister’s wife, after a summer working at a camp that rotated among college campuses across the Southeast; Stephenson, describing the feeling of being called into “some sort of ministry,” remembers them smiling at each other before telling him that they had been waiting for him to say it out loud. “People sensed a call in me before I even sensed that call in myself,” he says now, looking back at a chain of invitations—tables he was asked to sit at, where, in his words, he “didn’t belong,” exactly, but was allowed to stay—that he credits with nudging him toward the kind of work he does in Anderson.
He enrolled at the McAfee School of Theology, at Mercer University in Atlanta, choosing a concentration in community impact and development, and went in assuming that he would leave seminary for a nonprofit job. Instead, like many seminarians who still needed paychecks, he took the jobs that materialized: positions at First Baptist Gainesville and then Heritage Baptist Church in Cartersville, Georgia— “for our Clemson fans, that is the home of Trevor Lawrence”— and, almost before he noticed, he had spent roughly a decade in local churches. His wife, Anna Kate, also an ordained minister, would eventually take a position at Boulevard Baptist in Anderson, and it was that opportunity, he says, that finally gave him permission to make the jump he had postponed: out of the church proper and into the nonprofit world he had imagined in seminary.
Stephenson is careful not to describe his church years as a detour. The work, he says, was “adjacent” to the community efforts that now define his days: he facilitated projects, served on boards, tried to understand what churches were looking for when they agreed to support an organization, and watched how money, volunteers, and attention moved through a town. That vantage point, he argues, has turned out to be instructive for a United Way that no longer sees itself as a mere fundraising middleman — “for lack of a better way to put it,” he says—but as something closer to an air-traffic controller for local philanthropy and social services.
When Stephenson and his family arrived in Anderson in August of 2023—he still briefly stumbles over the date, as if surprised by how quickly the town has become familiar—they began work at Boulevard Baptist and, almost immediately, began saying yes. Within three years, he says, it has come to feel as though they have “been in Anderson forever,” a sensation he attributes less to any one role than to the cumulative effect of showing up: committees, coalitions, pilot projects, and the kind of recurring meetings where the same faces slowly become something like a local cabinet.
If Anderson has taught him anything, he says, it is that there is no shortage of people willing to help; the problem is rarely willingness, and almost always logistics. “Folks just don’t know where to go and where to serve,” he says, in the understated way of someone whose job is to make that problem sound solvable, and, in his view, it is the responsibility of nonprofits to help people find “the space where it gives them life to serve.” Asked whether there are too many nonprofits in Anderson County, he offers an answer that has the structure of a parable: from the perspective of organizations competing for limited local dollars, yes, there are too many; from the perspective of residents who need services, there are not nearly enough.
This tension—between abundance and scarcity, duplication and lack—is part of what attracted him to the United Way of Anderson County, which he describes as “the center of the nonprofit universe” here. The United Way logo, the familiar hand-and-rainbow icon, is a brand he has seen since childhood, but he insists that it is impossible to understand the institution by its billboards alone; “if you’ve seen one United Way, you’ve seen one United Way,” he says, repeating a line that circulates within the organization. The premise is that each local United Way adapts itself to the particular needs of its community, which is why Anderson’s looks different from the ones in Greenville, Oconee, Pickens, or the Lakelands, even as all of them rely on the same shorthand of t-shirts and annual campaigns.
In Anderson, some of the work is almost tactile in its simplicity. The weekend Snack Pack program — arguably the United Way’s most widely recognized effort — provides food for more than eight hundred elementary-school students across all five of the county’s school districts, a number that is recited with the rote precision of a liturgy because it stands for an infrastructure of volunteers, partnerships, and delivery routes that must function each week. A Women United group works in what Stephenson calls the “childhood literacy space,” and a longstanding collaboration with the YMCA, Camp IROC, focuses on rising third-graders who are not yet reading on grade level, the sort of targeted intervention that, in his view, demands a willingness to push even further “upstream.”
Earlier this year, that impulse produced a gathering he refers to as a “think tank,” bringing together nonprofit workers and educational leaders to consider how to instill a love of reading not only in children but in their caretakers, starting before those children can speak. It is the kind of meeting that might sound aspirational in a grant proposal but, in his telling, is also pragmatic: if the problem later is third-graders who cannot read, one answer is to stop waiting for third grade.
Other projects are more infrastructural, in the literal sense. The 211 system — reachable by call, text, or website — is a statewide resource line, written into South Carolina statute, that allows people to enter a ZIP Code and a need (food, rent assistance, shelter) and receive a list of local organizations that can help. Local United Ways have funded the system for years, but Stephenson is now working, alongside colleagues around the state, to make the service more proactive, following up with callers rather than simply handing them a list, and to persuade legislators in Columbia to help pay for that expansion so that 211 can function as a genuine counterpart to 911 during disasters such as last year’s Helene, when the goal was to keep non-emergency calls from overwhelming emergency lines.
Then there is the AOP Clubhouse, a project whose acronym—Anderson, Oconee, Pickens — has become a kind of shorthand in regional meetings for a change in how mental health care might look here. The model, borrowed from Clubhouse International, is “psychosocial” rather than medical by design: a place for people with severe and persistent mental illnesses to go during the day, not for therapy sessions or prescriptions but for community, routine, and the ordinary structure of work-like tasks and relationships. Many such clubhouses, he notes, have robust employment programs, and the AOP version is partnering with Vocational Rehabilitation and others so that someone who has dropped out of college because of mental-health issues, for instance, might find a path back to school or into a job, while recognizing that others will simply need a place to be, indefinitely.
The plan is to open, this summer, in the Pendleton Community Center — Pendleton being, as Stephenson points out, roughly the geographic center of the three counties — with the understanding that the first year will be a kind of rehearsal while they search for a permanent home. United Ways from the three counties are involved, along with AnMed, Tri-County Tech, and, in developing partnerships, Prisma; the point, in his description, is less to create a new standalone institution than to weave a new pattern through existing ones.
His other major preoccupation at the moment is a project with the Annie E. Casey Foundation called Teaming for Teens, a pilot operating not only in Anderson but also in Greenville and Spartanburg. The idea is simple to state and stubborn to execute: to prevent low- and moderate-income families with teenagers from becoming “system-involved” —entangled with the Department of Social Services, the Department of Juvenile Justice, or law enforcement — when what they are dealing with are, in essence, ordinary adolescent problems compounded by economic stress. “We’re not talking about issues of abuse,” he says; instead, he describes parents who, unsure where else to turn, reach for systems that, once activated, can be hard to exit.
To that end, Teaming for Teens has assembled a coalition that includes DSS, DJJ, law enforcement, nonprofits, educators, and “youth voice” participants who have themselves aged out of system involvement. In collaboration with the Clemson Learning Institute, they have created what he calls a curriculum but prefers to describe as an “experience,” aimed at helping community members understand what it feels like to enter state care. The short-term goal is to cultivate “community champions” who recognize that children in DSS or DJJ custody are “not DSS’s children, they’re not DJJ’s children, they’re our children” — a rhetorical shift that, in his formulation, precedes any practical one —and to roll out the experiential program in rotary clubs, churches, and similar settings within the next few months.
The longer-term ambition, on a two-to-five-year horizon, is to create resource hubs in smaller towns — Starr, Iva, Williamston, Pendleton, Honea Path, Belton — so that families do not have to travel to Anderson for help and can access services outside the usual business hours. The proposal reflects a recurring theme in Stephenson’s work: the insistence that geography and scheduling are not neutral facts but forms of inequality, and that a county’s moral life is legible in the places where its buses do and do not stop at 6 p.m.
Stephenson talks about these projects with the calm of someone who expects to be here long enough to see at least some of them falter, adjust, and then, perhaps, take root. He says he never imagined loving another place as much as he loved Rutherfordton, but that in “almost three years” Anderson has become a community his family loves “deeply,” one where they are intent on “deepening our roots” and staying “for the long haul.” The line could be mistaken for boilerplate, but for someone whose job is to think in five- and ten-year increments — how a third-grader becomes a reader, how a teenager avoids becoming a case file — it sounds more like a professional obligation: you cannot coordinate a county’s future if you do not intend to live with it.
