Communities Who Know, Inc.™ (CWK), established on October 12, 2017, as a non-profit organization, is focused on generating collaborative solutions for sustainable communities

The idea of CWK emerged from the Westside Communities Alliance (WCA), a collaborative campus-community engagement initiative at the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology that was organized and coordinated by Jacqueline Jones Royster.

Jacqueline Jones Royster is former Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology (2010-2019) and Professor Emerita at both The Ohio State University and Georgia Tech.

Her research focuses at the intersections of the history of rhetoric, feminist studies, and cultural studies, with interests in the connections between human and civil rights, as well as in the digital humanities. Her book publications include: Double-Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters (co-edited, 1991); Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1997; 2nd edition 2016), Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (2000), Profiles of Ohio Women, 1803-2003 (2003); Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture (co-edited, 2005); Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies (co-authored, 2012); one college textbook and two school textbook series. She has also authored numerous articles in rhetorical studies, literacy studies, and women’s studies.

Over her career, Royster has received several prestigious awards, among them: The Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize and the Frances Andrew March Award from the Modern Language Association; the Braddock Award and the Exemplar Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication; the Winifred Bryan Horner Award from the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. She has also been named a Fellow of the Rhetoric Society of America.