Helen grew up in Tenleytown, Washington, D.C., along Pierce Mill Road (modern-day Van Ness Avenue) in a Victorian country house.
She attended the famed "Colored High School" in Washington, D.C., at a time when the writer and feminist Anna J. Cooper was on the teaching staff.
Not long after beginning her career at the Howard School, Helen W. Anderson joined Edwina Kruse and Alice Baldwin in donating to the Sarah Ann White Home for Aged Colored Persons.
In 1913, when Blanche Stubbs, her husband, Alice Dunbar, and other Wilmington African-American leaders with the support of a white advisory board, undertook a fund-raising effort designed to provide a permanent home for the Garrett Settlement House, Helen Anderson served on the fund-raising committee.
Her remains were buried in the Trustees Section of the National Harmony Memorial Park in Maryland, the final resting place of many family members, including her mother's cousin Mary Ann Shadd Cary.