Director of Research

Email: ahendley@woodstockinst.org
Phone: O (312) 368-0310 x2030 | C (912) 388-4672

Amber S. Hendley joined Woodstock Institute as a Research Associate in 2022 and was named Director of Research in January 2023. She leads the organization’s research on financial security and equity for low- and moderate-income households and communities of color.

Previously Amber worked with Roosevelt University’s Policy Research Collaborative, where she authored two reports examining housing discrimination patterns in Chicago’s 2019-2021 rental markets. In June 2021, she coauthored Public Housing Authority Homeownership Programs: Scaling Up a Powerful Yet Underutilized Tool to Restore Wealth Building Opportunities. This report focused on the opportunities, barriers, and impacts of public housing authority homeownership programs as they relate to Black voucher holders.

In May 2019, Amber co-authored The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts. This publication quantified the amount legally and unjustly extracted from the Black community in Chicago through predatory residential contract selling during the Second Great Migration. Plunder of Black Wealth was released at a Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago symposium. It also helped inspire Tonika Johnson’s Inequity for Sale project on the ground in Chicago’s Englewood community.

Amber earned an M.A. in Analytical and Political Economy at Duke University and a B.S. in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Florida State University.