2025 Convening Highlights

Stephen P. Bishop, Associate Director, Probation and System Transformation Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at The Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Stephen Bishop is associate director for probation and system transformation with the Annie E. Casey Foundation and part of the leadership team of its Juvenile Justice Strategy Group and Center for Systems Innovation. Bishop leads the Foundation’s investments and initiatives with youth justice system and community partners to ensure that young people exposed to the legal system can realize their potential, even when they make mistakes and violate the law in serious ways. Achieving this vision means moving away from a culture of surveillance, punishment and confinement toward more developmentally appropriate responses to youth misbehavior. Bishop’s portfolio includes leading Casey’s efforts to transform youth probation, end the youth prison model and reduce inappropriate and unnecessary detention.

Lighting Talks

Lighting Talks are short engaging talks (about 8-10 min.) that are packed full of great content and promise to inspire and capture your attention. We will have two speakers share their experiences of housing and neighboring and you won’t want to miss it!

This year you will hear from high school students from the Neighboring Academy at Steelton-Highspire who are pursuing promising pathways to homeownership to break cycles of poverty. You will also hear from…

Kelly Waltman-Spreha, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Messiah University. Kelly helps leaders and teams cultivate spaces where people thrive, by sharing the tools to elevate connection, get comfortable with feedback, and improve communication. She brings over 20 years of professional development and public speaking experience to her work. From the classroom to the boardroom, Kelly has designed and delivered content for groups of all sizes. Her work focuses on workplace connection and communication, with an emphasis on taking the fear out of feedback. Kelly's career began as crime victim advocate for the Dauphin County Victim/Witness Assistance Program and continued on to include several years as a juvenile probation officer, several years working for the Pennsylvania Juvenile Court Judges’ Commission (including serving as the Director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Training & Research), and time spent consulting at a national level on criminal and juvenile justice reform. She has served the broader justice community by participating in several state-level committees, including over ten years of service on the PCCJPO Family Involvement Committee. Kelly is a board member for a local nonprofit organization, A Miracle 4 Sure, which provides re-entry services for recently incarcerated individuals. Kelly's scope of work includes workplace culture and communication research and consulting. She is an author having recently published the book, Elevate Connection.

Ling Dinse, Associate Professor of Social Work; Department Chair/Program Director of Social Work. Dr. Dinse is a seasoned practitioner and has been a PA-licensed social worker for 28 years. She has been in higher education for over a decade and is an active speaker in the areas of racial reconciliation, religious trauma, intentional dialogues, human trafficking, and social justice. Dr. Dinse enjoys academic research, and her research topics are centered on encouraging relational healing. Her current research topics include understanding church trauma and the development of civil conversations. Originally from Hong Kong, Dr. Dinse completed her B.A. and MSW degrees at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Dr. Dinse received her Doctor of Social Work degree at Millersville University, PA. Dr. Dinse has been married to her husband, Dr. Dan, for 33 years, and they have two adult daughters and two sons-in-law.

Following lunch, we will host an “unconference” to share some of the collective wisdom that has been gathered at the convening. If you haven’t ever experienced an “Unconference” before, it is an organic way to invite participants to facilitate conversations on housing & neighboring topics they have experience with and think would be of interest to others. On the day of the convening, participants will be invited to sign up to facilitate a table discussion around a topic of their choice related to neighboring & housing after they have registered. To reserve a table, you need only to write the discussion topic by the table number on a large poster that will be provided. Table reservations are on a first come first served basis. Convening participants are invited to review the topics being proposed to see what discussion they would like to join following lunch. Given this organic approach, participants can come and go as they please and facilitators can decide how long they would like to have the table discussion last, however, all discussions must end by 3PM.

Following lunch, convening participants who register together are invited to either participate in the “Unconference” or use the afternoon time to work together on strategic planning. Organizations are encouraged to leverage this opportunity with their teams to make the most of the morning discussions and related resources into their future plans.

A moderated plenary panel with experienced professionals engaging housing and neighboring from diverse perspectives will touch on the following…

Panelists will share concrete examples from their varied experiences of how neighboring principals can impact practice. These insights will help participants working to put theory into practice in their local contexts and diverse neighborhoods.

We hope to spark some catalytic conversations around housing and neighboring policy. Toward that end, we will offer some specific examples of where policy can be improved and how we can more effectively introduce change.

Panel participants will reflect on how philanthropists can respond to the changing landscape of housing & neighboring. While government funding is certainly a crucial component to address the housing crisis at scale, we will discuss some promising opportunities where philanthropists can engage in mutually beneficial and reciprocal partnerships.

• Caroline Griffin Eister, Director of Fair Housing & Commercial Property at Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC)

• Mary E. Kuna, Executive Director at Housing and Redevelopment Authorities of Cumberland County

• Randie Yeager, Human Services Director Dauphin County

• Trish Rhoads, Housing Representative for Perry County