Stephanie Acker

Stephanie (Steph) Acker is the founder of Everyplace, a nonprofit that partners with refugee communities to transform camps, settlements, and shelters into places of beauty, dignity, and belonging through art, design, and creative placemaking. She brings nearly twenty years of work on refugees’ rights and protection — locally, nationally, and internationally. She is also a Research Associate at the Migration Policy Centre of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in Florence, where her work has spanned engagement, communications, and public-facing initiatives at the intersection of research, policy, and practice. She helped start the U-Lead program connects unaccompanied minors, young adults, Italian high-school students and members of academia to build leadership, empathy and civic participation.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Work from Gordon College and a Master’s degree in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School. In 2015, she was selected as a United States Presidential Management Fellow, a prestigious federal programme for training leaders in the US public administration. She was also a Policy Leader Fellow at the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in 2021–2022.

Throughout her career, she has held senior positions at the US Department of Health and Human Services, working on issues relating to refugees, human trafficking and migrant children, and was one of the lead officials responsible for programmes to tackle housing poverty and homelessness in the city of Boston. She has also coordinated innovative social initiatives and community programmes aimed at young people and families.

Her best-known publications and research include *Beauty and Beautification in Refugees’ Lives and Their Implications for Refugee Policy* and *Faith Actors and the Global Compact on Refugees*, works which have contributed to the international debate on migration policies and the inclusion of refugees.