Our Story
Acorn Learning began in 2013 as Acorn Evaluation. Our mission: to help organizations grow and achieve their full potential - just like the tiny acorns that surround our home office in San Diego, each holding the promise of becoming a mighty oak. We started as a consulting and evaluation company, designing technical tools to help programs evaluate their outcomes. While those tools were powerful, we quickly realized they weren’t enough on their own. Without the foundational skills to use them - like data literacy, strong workflows, and confident leadership - even the best tools would go unused.
So, we shifted our focus. We began offering professional development in areas like data storytelling, management practices, and continuous improvement - laying the groundwork that programs needed to use data with purpose and confidence. Over time, this kind of capacity-building became central to our work. Evaluation took a back seat, and in 2023, we launched a new name for our professional development programs: Acorn Learning. In 2025 we dropped the “Evaluation” part of our name to reflect the truth of who we’d become - not just an evaluation firm, but a learning company.
Today, Acorn has served hundreds of Head Start and Community Action Programs across the country - programs doing high-stakes, high-impact work for children and families living in poverty. These agencies need skilled leadership and well-organized systems to succeed. We’re here to help them get there - with professional development that build capacity for long-term impact.
At every step, our mission remains the same: to help programs learn and improve so they can better serve their communities. We believe in the potential of every person and every program we work with - and we’re here to support that growth with expertise, heart, and the belief that change is possible.
Management Team
Stuart Jones, M.A.
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.
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.