Stephanie Acker

Stephanie Acker is the Executive Director of Everyplace, a nonprofit organization working to transform the global response to refugees through beauty in the built environment. With nearly 20 years of experience across refugee protection, migration, public policy, humanitarian response, and community engagement, her work sits at the intersection of displacement, belonging, aesthetics, and spatial justice.

Her career began in grassroots, place-based organizing, where she led interfaith and community initiatives in refugee and immigrant neighborhoods. She is also a co-founder of Soccer Nights, a long-running community program that has created spaces of connection and belonging for young people and families from diverse backgrounds for more than 18 years. This early work grounded her enduring interest in how physical and social environments shape dignity, participation, and collective life.

Over the course of her career, Stephanie has worked locally, nationally and internationally. For the City of Boston, she led emergency shelter operations and supported initiatives at the intersection of community engagement, public health, and equity. She served as National Public Information Officer with the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the United States Department of Health and Human Services, overseeing communications and operations related to emergency shelter response for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. She also worked as a policy analyst with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, contributing to evidence-based refugee policy and services. Internationally, Stephanie has worked with UNICEF and with the Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action, where she co-led global work on assessment, measurement, and evidence.

Stephanie was a research associate at the European University Institute’s Migration Policy Centre. She is also a visiting scholar at Clark University's Integration and Belonging Hub.

Through Everyplace, she now works to elevate beauty as an essential dimension of dignity, healing, and belonging in refugee and displacement contexts, with particular attention to the power of architecture, art, and placemaking to support more humane futures.

Stephanie was born in Southern California, considers Boston home and is currently based in Florence, Italy, where she lives with her husband, 3 kids, and 6 bikes.