Grace Palmer

Grace Palmer is an Assistant Director on the Children & Families team. Since joining the GPL in 2019, she has led several major family wellbeing and child welfare prevention projects. She currently leads work focused on how government can improve outcomes related to parental substance use disorder, youth mental health, and preventing child welfare contact. This includes managing a multi-agency engagement with Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to improve family access to resources like state benefits, early childhood programs, and mental health services through referral pathways from the child welfare hotline, schools, and other community settings.

During earlier work in New Hampshire, she supported home visiting providers and a major hospital system to connect families experiencing substance use with prevention programming; piloted a new practice for the state hotline team to share community-based alternatives to the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF); and developed a COVID-19 family resource guide that reached thousands of families and became a nationally replicated model. Since then, Grace has built on these learnings through work with Washington State, Colorado, and New Mexico to improve health outcomes and reduce Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement for substance-using pregnant and newly parenting caregivers.

Grace holds a BA in History from Brown University and an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband and rescue dog. In her spare time, Grace is an avid reader and enjoys hiking and nature walking through New England, traveling, and cooking.