About

  • We believe beauty is how people rebuild.

    Everyplace partners with refugee communities to create beauty, belonging, and dignity in the places they're living right now—because life doesn't pause in displacement, and dignity can't wait for policies to catch up.

  • More than 75% of refugees live away from home for years, sometimes decades.

    But the places they're living were never designed for actual life.

    A tent meant for one year gets used for twenty. Camps built for emergencies become permanent neighborhoods. Warehouses and shipping containers become "housing."

    These spaces send a clear message: This is temporary. Don't get comfortable. You don't belong here.

    But here's the reality: life keeps happening. Children grow up. People fall in love. Families grieve losses and celebrate milestones.

    When the only goal is keeping people alive, we forget they're also living, and millions of people spend years, sometimes entire childhoods, in places that strip away dignity, hope, and the feeling of home.

  • Everyplace partners with local leaders in refugee communities and supports communities’ visions, plans and priorities to making the places they live right now feel more like home.

    This might look like:

    • Gardens planted outside shelters

    • Murals painted on bare concrete walls

    • Gathering spaces where neighbors can rest and children can play

    • Reclaiming and repurposing spaces.

    We don't replace humanitarian aid or policy reform. We intervene where those systems fall short, by restoring humanity inside long-term displacement.

  • Everyplace doesn't arrive with plans.

    We follow the lead of refugee communities who are already doing this work, planting gardens in dust, painting walls never meant to last, creating gathering spaces out of nothing.

    This impulse to make home is already there. We recognize it, fund it, and amplify it.

    Our role is to bring these often unnoticed acts of agency out of the margins and into the center of how the world responds to displacement.

  • Everyplace builds on the foundational work conducted by Clark University’s Home Ground Lab.

    Home Ground Lab was a research initiative that explored how beauty, place, and the built environment shape dignity and belonging for communities affected by displacement.

    This lab developed frameworks, methodologies and concepts demonstrating that beauty isn't optional in humanitarian response; it's infrastructure. Everyplace works to advance and implement these findings.

  • Everyplace operates as a project of Players Philanthropy Fund, a Maryland charitable trust recognized by IRS as a tax-exempt public charity under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code (Federal Tax ID: 27-6601178). Contributions to Everyplace are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

Meet our founder

About Stephanie

Stephanie Acker brings nearly 20 years of experience working locally, nationally, and internationally on refugees' rights and protections. Her career began on the ground—running place-based and interfaith community organizing initiatives in refugee and immigrant neighborhoods. She is a co-founder of Soccer Nights, a community program that has run consecutively for more than 18 years.

That grassroots foundation shaped everything that followed.

At the municipal level, Stephanie led the City of Boston's emergency shelters and supported initiatives at the intersection of community engagement, public health, and equity. At the federal level, she worked as the National Public Information officer with the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, overseeing operation and communications for influx shelter response on the Southwest border for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. She also worked as a policy analyst with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS, advancing evidence-based refugee policies and services.

Internationally, Stephanie has held roles with UNICEF, supporting global child protection and humanitarian programming, and with the Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action, where she co-led work on assessment, measurement, and evidence.

Academically, Stephanie has held roles with the European University Institute’s Migration Policy Centre, where she has overseen engagement, communications, and public-facing initiatives at the intersection of research, policy, and practice. She spearheaded outreach, program design and curriculum to create, U-Lead, a participatory youth program designed to foster leadership, belonging, and civic engagement among diverse groups of young people, including migrants, refugees, and local youth in Florence. She is also a visiting scholar at Clark University's Integration and Belonging Hub.

Across every role, Stephanie is known for bridging rigorous research with accessible storytelling. She has led global communications strategies, designed participatory and arts-based research processes, authored policy-relevant content, and helped organizations translate evidence into funding, advocacy, and program design.

She was born in Southern California, considers Boston home and is currently based in Florence, Italy, where she lives with her husband, 2 (soon to be 3) kids, and 6 bikes.

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