Women of Western Wake: Joanna Helms

Twelve years ago, Joanna Helms walked into The Depot in downtown Apex as a department of one. There was no playbook, no precedent. All Joanna had was a mandate to build an economic development department from scratch in a town that was one of the last in Wake County to decide it needed one.

Today, the economic development team of five is closing out a chapter that will reshape the entire region: a 230-acre, 500-bed standalone children’s hospital — the second largest in the country — rising out of the ground in Apex’s Veridea development.

“I’ve never had a project like this one,” Joanna says. “I’ve never had a project that was so impactful.”

When the North Carolina Economic Development Association handed her the state’s top honor for the deal, she cried. She’s quick to clarify that her reaction wasn’t because of the award itself, but because of what it means. NC Children’s Hospital will be the only standalone pediatric hospital within a five-state radius staffed entirely by doctors, nurses, and technicians trained exclusively in pediatric care. It’s expected to create 5,000 jobs, and Wake Tech is already building a specialized nursing program to feed it.

“It’s not just an Apex project,” Joanna explains. “It’s not even just a North Carolina project.”

Joanna tours an industrial building under construction.

Despite helping to quite literally change the landscape, Joanna didn’t set out to be an economic developer. She has a degree in planning, spent time in commercial development in Raleigh, and worked in hotel sales and marketing before a chance conversation in Goldsboro changed her trajectory. Someone mentioned there being an opening in economic development for Wayne County.

She admits today that back then she’d never heard of economic development, but the job was described as a mix of planning, sales, and marketing of a community. “Check, check, check,” she describes thinking. “I can do that.”

She ended up doing it for 21 years, which is a rarity in her industry. But when her sons, Adrian and Lucas, headed off to college, Joanna and her husband, Tim, who both grew up in the Triangle, set their sights on home.

“This is just divine intervention,” she recalls thinking when Apex posted its first-ever economic development director position just as she and Tim were ready to make the move.

After two decades of being recognized everywhere she went, as Joanna says, “I couldn’t go to the grocery store without being pulled into a work conversation,” she carried over from Goldsboro a hard-won appreciation for boundaries. In Apex she’s found a way to keep her professional life from swallowing her personal one entirely. “It’s kind of a beautiful thing,” she says, “to not feel like you’re still at work on the weekends.”

She credits her father, a career IBM salesman, for the determination to not take herself too seriously outside the office, and her mother, a real estate agent, for the discipline that keeps her sharp inside it.

Standing up a department from nothing meant relearning a town the Apex High School graduate thought she already knew. The people had changed, so she spent her first six months cold-calling businesses in every industry and as many small businesses as she could reach.

“I’m from the government. I’m not trying to sell you anything,” she says she’d tell them, only half-joking. “I’m here to help you, and here are the different ways we can help each other.”

As major Green Bay Packers fans, watching a game at Lambeau Field checked off a bucket-list item for Joanna and Tim.

Economic development, Joanna explains, is as much about infrastructure and patience as it is about pitching. A town must have buildings, sites, water, sewer, and power in place before it can compete for major employers. Sometimes, it takes years of groundwork before the first deal ever closes. Joanna likes to compare it to hosting a dinner party: You don’t invite 50 companies to see what Apex has to offer and then have nothing to serve them.

“You need to make sure your community is prepared to accept those opportunities,” she explains.

That preparation is what made the Children’s Hospital possible. A site was ready, relationships had already been forged, and in place was a Town team that, in her words, was “willing to roll up their sleeves.” She describes her own role less as mastermind and more as ringmaster. “I’m just the cat herder.”

When Joanna entered the profession, economic development conferences were, by her estimate, roughly 80% male and 80% over 65. She remembers walking into rooms as a woman in her 30s and being dismissed outright.

So when asked what keeps her going after four decades, Joanna doesn’t point to a project or an award. She points to the people a generation or two behind her.

“I see all my peers that are my age group that have been doing this for a while, and I love them to death, and they’re great,” she says, “but what excites me is when I walk in a room and see a bunch of people I’ve never seen before and they’re like my niece and nephews’ or my son’s age. I gravitate towards the youth.”

It’s not nostalgia, as Joanna describes younger colleagues bringing something to the profession she can no longer generate on her own. “I really appreciate the fact that they look at the world, and the economic developer profession, through a different lens that I just can’t,” she says. “Being around them and learning from them is just as rewarding to me as when they want me to be their mentor, because I learn so much more from them. They ask questions that I never would have thought to ask.”

That philosophy shapes how she hires and how she leads. Rather than surrounding herself with others who think the way she does, she deliberately looks for those who don’t. Different ages, different backgrounds, different starting points; her most recent hires are in their early 20s.

Early in her own career, she says, she internalized the idea that asking questions made her look unprepared. She’s spent the years since unlearning that, and now she makes a point of modeling the opposite in front of her staff. Joanna’s known to stop meetings cold to say, “I don’t understand what that means; can you explain it?”

Joanna wears a NC Children’s Hospital jersey and hat on announcement day.

“That’s one of the things I encourage my mentees,” she says. “Don’t be afraid to ask those questions when you’re young. You’re not stupid. You’re not dumb. You are capable. It’s just you don’t have the years of experience — and you can’t learn it all in one day.”

As a past president of the North Carolina Economic Development Association, Joanna helped push the statewide organization to be more deliberate about the talent they’re bringing in. By establishing scholarships, offering discounted memberships for college students, initiating a formal mentoring program, and directing outreach to historically Black colleges and universities to introduce the profession before students ever consider it, a field that for most of Joanna’s career wasn’t built with youth and diversity in mind has expanded.

“What excites me,” she shares, “is when I go to a conference now and see tons of women, tons of young people right out of college going into the profession.”

Joanna describes herself at 25 as someone with an entirely different life plan. She wanted to work for five years, then stay home full time with what she assumed would be four children. Instead, she never stopped working. After a few months of maternity leave, she realized that she brought more value to her family as a mother who went to the office every day.

She names perseverance, organization, kindness, and authenticity as the core values that have carried her through her career, along with a lesson she says took her far too long to learn: delegation.

“Nobody’s going to do it as good as I can do it,” she says she used to think, before clarifying: “And that cannot be less true.” Handing off work, Joanna came to realize, isn’t giving something up; it’s training the next generation to do it, sometimes better than she ever did.

She’s equally direct about accountability. When something goes right, her staff gets the credit. When something goes wrong, she takes the blame, whether the mistake was hers or not.

“That’s my role,” she says. “My role is not to throw you under the bus.”

Joanna with her husband Tim and sons Adrian and Lucas

Apex Economic Development Manager Colleen Merays has learned much from Joanna. “Working under Joanna’s leadership for the past seven years has been an incredibly rewarding experience,” she says. “I have learned so much from her expertise, guidance, and thoughtful approach to economic development.” Colleen further describes Joanna as “a leader who empowers her team, shares her knowledge, and encourages us to grow and be our best.”

Growing up as one of five siblings, three of whom live nearby along with their own children and grandchildren, heavily influenced Joanna’s priorities. The family of 32 still gathers at least once a month for dinner.

“It’s a crazy, beautiful mess,” she explains, “but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Joanna says Apex is her last professional stop. She plans to retire from economic development at the Town, take on something part time for a few years afterward (she’s not saying what yet), and then step back for good.

Until then, there’s a hospital breaking ground in 2027, an industrial park entering its second and third phases, and a Wake Tech campus rising out of the 1,100-acre development that will one day be, as she puts it, “a little mini-city within Apex.”

Asked what she hopes to leave behind when she finally does walk away, Joanna doesn’t talk about buildings or job numbers. She talks about the people she’s trained on her staff and across the state and whether they’re ready to carry forward without her.

“I hope that I’ve had enough opportunity to mentor,” she says, “so that I can walk away and say, ‘This is in good hands.’”