Advisory Board
Dr. Bill McKinney serves as the Executive Director of the New Kensington Community Development Corporation, a non-profit organization whose mission is to advances social equity & economic empowerment by nurturing and creating opportunities for neighbors to live in, and actively shape, their neighborhoods of choice. While NKCDC co-creates solutions in response to a number of community priorities much of it’s work is centered on the building, preservation and maintenance of deeply affordable housing in Philadelphia. A 25 year resident of Kensington, Philadelphia, Dr. McKinney has focused his efforts on a variety of issues related to race, equity and economic justice with a particular focus on solutions within the areas of housing access and affordability; equitable community development; food systems; public health; civic engagement and participation; criminal justice reform; and violence intervention. Dr. McKinney holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Temple University, a Master’s degree in Applied Anthropology from the University of Maryland, and a B.A. in Anthropology from Cleveland State University. In addition to serving as an Advisor to PHL, Dr. McKinney currently serves on the Board of Directors of Neighborworks Capital; Fab Youth Philly; Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations; GALAEI; the Health Federation of Philadelphia and the City of Philadelphia’s H.O.M.E. Initiative.
Katharine (Katie) Nelson (PhD) is the Associate Director for Housing at the Center for Law Inequality and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME) at Rutgers Law School where she oversees the Center's housing studies work. Katie is a housing and community development expert with sophistication in GIS, program evaluation, spatial analysis, and quantitative and mixed methods research. She is also a forever resident of Philadelphia with a lifelong mission to fight for housing as a human right.
Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. Her research examines the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. She is the author of Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing, which explores how the politics of public housing planning and race in Atlanta created a politics of resistance within its public housing developments. She is also the lead author of A Green New Deal for K-12 Schools, through her work with the climate + community project. She has received funding from the Spencer Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania’s Environmental Innovation Initiative and Projects for Progress funds to support her work around school facilities planning in Philadelphia public schools. Her next book manuscript examines the role of Black women community organizers in producing collective care in the built environment with the absence of capital and presence of harm over the 20th century.
Bench Ansfield is a historian of housing, racial capitalism, and twentieth-century American cities. They are an Assistant Professor of History at Temple University and the author of Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City (W. W. Norton), which examines the wave of arson for profit that coursed through the Bronx and scores of U.S. cities in the 1970s. The book is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, and it was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2025 by the New York Times. Bench is also a longtime member of the veteran transformative justice organization Philly Stands Up.
Stephanie Dorenbosch is the Associate Director of the Andy and Gwen Stern Community Lawyering Clinic at the Drexel Kline School of Law, supervising law students as they represent clients on housing and post-conviction cases and provide other legal services to the communities around Drexel. She is an adjunct professor in the undergraduate Law program, teaching courses on tenants' rights and organizing and on the legal profession. Stephanie was previously the Director of Tenant Advocacy at TURN, where she helped expand the Philly Tenant Rights Hotline and worked with advocates and city officials to develop new tenant protections during the COVID-19 pandemic, among other projects. She has also worked at HELP:MLP and Justice at Work, where she represented clients on housing, employment, and immigration cases, created community legal education workshops, advocated for changes to local laws, and served on advisory councils and working groups. She is fortunate to have had many opportunities along the way to support, collaborate with, and learn from community organizers and movement groups. She received her JD from Harvard Law School.