When she moved to Middle Tennessee from the suburbs of Indianapolis, Indiana, after high school, Erika Burnett immediately felt at home at Tennessee State University in Nashville.
“I decided pretty early on I wanted to attend a historically black college or university,” Burnett says. “I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but I wanted to be in a place where I felt more welcome and where there was community that I’d been missing.”
Burnett moved to Chattanooga in 2020 to become executive director of the Women’s Fund of Greater Chattanooga, and says her time in the mid-state, including graduate school at Vanderbilt University, formed the foundation of a career that has included consulting and helping shape public policy through women-centered nonprofit organizations.
While at Tennessee State, where she majored in English education, Burnett spent time teaching at Nashville’s Glencliff High School. While she had deep empathy for her urban students, who in many instances experienced gang violence, she found herself wanting to look for systemic solutions.
“I adored those students, but I recognized that I didn’t have the impact I wanted to have from inside the classroom,” she says. ” I wanted to get at the root cause.”