Jill Richter

Jill Richter is a senior researcher in the Youth, Family, and Community Development program area at AIR. Her work focuses on integrating youth development across systems and settings outside of the school day, including out-of-school time (OST), post-secondary, workforce, juvenile justice, and public health. She has more than 15 years of experience leading and supporting research, evaluation, and capacity building projects at the national, state, and local levels. She specializes in mixed methods implementation studies and evaluation capacity building.

At AIR, Dr. Richter serves as the Co-PI of the OST Cost Study to describe the current landscape of OST programs and the related ingredients and costs. As a result of this study, AIR will produce an updated cost calculator that will help the OST field advocate, resource, and plan for high-quality programs. She is also the implementation study lead for the Neighborhood Opportunity Accountability Board, a point-of-arrest restorative youth diversion program based in Oakland, California. Additionally, she supports the PROMISE Center's work focused on understanding the challenges and barriers that opportunity youth commonly face when seeking services and identifying promising strategies to promote stronger success. She also serves as a member of AIR’s Institutional Review Board, which ensures that projects involving human subjects comply with professional standards and government regulations designed to safeguard participants. Outside of AIR, she serves on the publication committee for the Journal of Youth Development, on the research advisory committee for Youth Today, and on the publication board for the Information Age Publishing book series on Current Issues in Out-of-School Time.

Prior to joining AIR, Dr. Richter supported Chicago’s largest OST system, After School Matters, where she served as the Senior Director of Research and Evaluation. In that role, she led research, evaluation, continuous quality improvement, and capacity building efforts. She also previously served as an adjunct professor at Loyola University Chicago, where she taught classes in research methods and educational statistics.