Chapin Hall

Mallory VanMeeter is a Researcher at Chapin Hall. In their research, VanMeeter looks at how natural supports, like extended family and informal mentors, impact the wellbeing and housing stability of youth facing homelessness in the U.S. Her work also explores how public resources and policy change might help bolster these informal social safety nets. VanMeeter is also helping develop a set of promising strategies for community involvement in public system decision making based on academic literature and perspectives from the field, with a focus on Black and non-Black communities of color. VanMeeter’s expertise includes community based participatory research, qualitative and mixed methods, youth homelessness, nonprofit studies, research translation, and data visualization.

Before joining Chapin Hall, VanMeeter worked as an independent research consultant. They contributed to projects on youth homelessness and community engagement, through clients including Chapin Hall, the California Homelessness Coordinating and Financing Council, and CloseKnit in Minneapolis. During graduate school, VanMeeter served as a communications specialist at the UW-Madison Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies. They also worked at the UW-Madison Population Health Institute doing community-engaged and mixed methods research, including a statewide evaluation of Wisconsin’s behavioral health system. Prior to graduate school, VanMeeter worked at Chapin Hall as a qualitative research assistant for the Voices of Youth Count initiative.

VanMeeter is currently a PhD candidate in Civil Society and Community Research at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She received a Master of Science in Human Ecology from UW-Madison and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Chicago.