OLi provides state, local, and federal governments with trauma-informed and culturally sensitive expertise and training on housing policy and race and gender equity. We assist Continuums-of-Care and homeless service systems with equitable approaches to data evaluation and management and plain language implementation
We work in partnership with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to address housing inequality. Our principal consultant, Austen Smith, has conducted community participatory research for state and local governments nationwide.
We provide training and consultation on gender identity and race/ethnicity data elements, the Equal Access Rule, equitable policy analysis, and restructuring organizations with an intersectional lens.
Austen Smith is a social justice researcher, housing consultant, imagination doula, and owner of Our Lunar Intelligence. Our Lunar Intelligence works with and designs liberatory methods, frameworks, philosophies, and practices to develop reparative spatial justice outcomes and to heal imaginations impacted by systemic oppression.
Their lived experience complements 17 years of professional experience in social work, community participatory research, program evaluation, grief literacy, and trauma-informed training.
Their most recent projects include co-developing culturally sensitive federal gender data elements for emergency shelters that are HUD recipients, program evaluation for an organization addressing redlining, and program evaluation for a language justice organization offering translation and interpretation services for immigrant homeowners. Austen thrives most when engaging with communities to turn lived experiences and dreams into equitable data strategies, sustainable recommendations, and healing community practices.
Austen is a 2024 Spatial Futures Fellow at PolicyLink's inaugural Spatial Futures Initiative, a catalyst and visionary policy hub for reparative spatial justice work in land and housing. Read the Grounding Justice: Toward Reparative Spatial Futures in Land and Housing framing paper here.
From 2016-2022 Austen served as a data collector and research coordinator with the University of Virginia's Compassionate Schools Project.
For 2 years, Austen served as a lead data coach for HUD's Coordinated Entry Racial Equity Initiative, leading communities while conducting mixed methods analyses of homeless response systems across the nation.
Austen has provided technical assistance to state and local governments and housing response systems nationwide, including Arkansas, North Carolina, Minnesota, Ohio, Washington State, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Nevada, and Georgia.
Austen has developed and facilitated numerous trainings on topics including data analytics, best housing practices, implementing qualitative approaches, racial accountability, systems performance improvement, and building coalitions.
Between 2021-2022, Austen co-led an evaluation of a housing authority governance board for a major urban city with a history of racialized housing inequities.
In 2022, Austen conducted on-site focus groups at selected shelters for a racial equity analysis conducted in a rural region interested in eradicating racial inequities from public service processes.
In 2022, Austen co-led a thematic analysis on a major urban city, and trained community researchers with lived experience of homelessness on qualitative evaluation and analysis.
Between 2022 and 2023, Austen conducted a qualitative analysis of community focus groups, co-created a dashboard built to disaggregate qualitative feedback, and revised the methodology.
Our Lunar Intelligence and Imaginationdoulas are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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