On Friday, January 24, 2025, our community gathered to celebrate the life of Dionne Greenlee. This is our best effort to appreciate her impact as our former co-worker, Board Member, and friend. Her obituary can be found here.
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There are people in this world who possess a great kind of power, one that is forged from love. Dionne Greenlee was one such person, and our United Way team had the good fortune to work alongside her in a number of ways over the years.
Dionne joined our team in 2017, serving first as an NC 211 Information and Referral Specialist and then on our Resource Development team. After leaving our staff, Dionne didn’t go far, serving on our Board of Directors and, more recently, on the Interim Steering Committee for the newly forming Buncombe County Long-Term Recovery Group, a community-led initiative dedicated to ensuring every individual and family impacted by the storm recover.
While with our team, Dionne was a champion for the role of 211 in serving our community. Whether answering calls or speaking out on behalf of the statewide call center, Dionne was a passionate advocate for ensuring that every caller received high-quality information and compassionate care.
As a resource development professional, Dionne possessed an innate ability to connect with donors through her storytelling and background as a 211 information and referral specialist. She was also a superb writer who embraced the challenge of grant writing and helped drive the diversification of UWABC’s revenue streams by doing so.
While a staff member, she co-chaired our staff-led diversity, equity, and inclusion work group, which served as the precursor to our board-level Equity Change Team a few years later.
Over the last few months, Dionne had served on the Interim Steering Committee for the Buncombe County Long-Term Recovery Group. Community members nominated her to support the development of the infrastructure for this critical resource. She brought her commitment to collaboration, equity, and putting the community first to this role. She was a champion for innovative approaches and building upon the amazing strengths of our community. She wanted to help ensure the long-term recovery of our community.
These are just a few of the many ways Dionne improved our world. Throughout it all, she challenged each of us to look at our practical commitments to incorporating the voices of those most impacted by the issues we sought to improve.
When Dionne saw you, she REALLY saw you. She had a way of making you feel important and valued. Kiesha Lewis, another former 211 Referral Specialist, shared,“Thank you so much for this opportunity to remember Dionne. I've been thinking about all the times we have bumped into each other since our 211 days, and I laugh at how we always seem to bump into each other when we're with other people and how we would talk for so long and forget about the people around us. She always gave the best hugs, and I will miss running into her.”
Amanda Bauman, former director of our 211 Asheville Call Center, remembers how, when COVID hit, Dionne jumped at the chance to pick up shifts on the phone lines, both to help her former teammates handle the unprecedented volume of calls but, more importantly, to ensure people heard a caring voice during that troubling time. “Dionne never stopped advocating for the health and well-being of the people of WNC. I’m grateful I got to work with her again when she recruited me to join her at Impact Health,” said Bauman.
Elisabeth Bocklet, Senior Director of Marketing and Communications, remembers how Dionne would slip into her office to brainstorm yet another new idea she had hatched, “Dionne would tell me that she was really supposed to be on the MarCom team, and then list the many roles she had played as an employee or volunteer over the years that proved her point. I remember joking that the only job on the planet she had never held was a zookeeper, but she said, ‘Don’t be so sure!’”
We will miss you, Dionne. We will miss your spirited candor and deep and abiding love for the people of this community, especially the Swannanoa Valley. We will do our very best to make you proud.
The "required" make-a-funny-face picture from our 2017 UWABC staff retreat. Dionne is at the center of the picture, and her family is centered in our hearts as they mourn the loss of their beloved.