Overview

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.