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Honoring Leo Elliot, Susan Layne, and Nancy Geist for their skillful and committed work in making the Eviction Diversion Program Portal possible and their nationally-recognized success in keeping thousands of Philadelphians in their homes.
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WHEREAS, Philadelphia’s Eviction Diversion Program is a nationally recognized model for keeping families housed. By bringing landlords and tenants together before an eviction is filed, connecting households to rental assistance and counseling, and resolving disputes through mediation rather than the courtroom, the program has prevented thousands of evictions in Philadelphia each year and has become a template studied by jurisdictions across the country; and
WHEREAS, The Eviction Diversion Program operates through the day-in, day-out coordination of multiple partner organizations, including CORA Services / Good Shepherd Mediation, Philadelphia Legal Assistance, Community Legal Services, and the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation, working alongside the City of Philadelphia and Philadelphia’s housing counseling agencies. From its earliest days the program has been shaped by ongoing feedback from every group it touches, tenants, landlords, landlord advocates, mediators, attorneys, and housing counselors alike, and its strength has always come from sustained partnership and shared learning across them; and
WHEREAS, In February 2026, after years of cross-agency design, development, and testing, the program launched a new Eviction Diversion Program Portal: a single digital system that receives applications, routes them across pathways, supports mediation, rental assistance, and direct negotiation, and connects all partner organizations. The Portal is the operational foundation that allows the program to function at the scale that Philadelphia’s housing emergency demands; and
WHEREAS, Leo Elliot of Philadelphia Legal Assistance is the Program Coordinator for PLA’s EDP tenant hotline, coordinating a team of paralegals who answer the calls of Philadelphia tenants seeking guidance about the Eviction Diversion Program and the protections it offers. He also plays a central role in the careful choreography of scheduling housing counseling appointments; work that requires constant collaboration across organizations so that each tenant who reaches out can be connected, at the right moment, to the help they need; and
WHEREAS, Over the multi-year development of the Eviction Diversion Program Portal, and on top of his full-time hotline responsibilities, Mr. Elliot brought a tenant advocate’s perspective to a deeply technical project, working to ensure that the Portal’s logic, notifications, and workflows reflected what tenants actually experience and need. At the same time, he developed an uncommon command of the Portal’s underlying formulas, data structures, and notification triggers, and used that deep knowledge to identify systemic problems whose effects reached far beyond those who call the hotline; and
WHEREAS, Mr. Elliot tested every part of the Portal, not only the features that mattered to his organization or to tenants, and followed every issue he raised through to its resolution. He became, in effect, one of the Portal’s most committed stewards: a connective thread among the many people and organizations involved in building the system, and a quiet but essential force in holding the work together; and
WHEREAS, Where others saw a tool to be used, Mr. Elliot saw a system to be understood; its logic, its language, its vulnerabilities. He learned that language fluently, then spoke it on behalf of every participant and partner who would one day move through its circuits; and
WHEREAS, Susan Layne of CORA Services / Good Shepherd Mediation leads the Eviction Diversion Program’s application review team, which processes thousands of landlord applications each month with both timeliness and thoroughness. Her team is the entrance point for the landlords who apply, and when an application arrives incomplete, the team works diligently and compassionately to help the applicant resolve the issues so that they and their tenants can enter the program; and
WHEREAS, While carrying that full operational load, Ms. Layne devoted countless hours and relentless focus to the design and refinement of the Portal. During the soft launch, she and her team juggled both the legacy portal and the new one in parallel, reviewing applications in two systems at once while continuing to shape the new system from within. Through it all she insisted on a review process that is fast enough to keep pace with demand, accurate enough to connect each household with the right resources, and clear enough that landlords and tenants understand at every step what is happening with their application; and
WHEREAS, Ms. Layne approached every problem with extraordinary persistence - testing fixes, tracking which issues had been resolved and which had not, and refusing to accept partial answers when more was possible. In February 2026, her team approved the first application to be processed under the new fully launched Portal, demonstrating that what had been imagined for years now worked in practice at scale; and
WHEREAS, If the Eviction Diversion Program has a front door, Ms. Layne is the person who has spent years making sure it opens; for the landlords who arrive uncertain or frustrated or who have difficulty with paperwork or technology. Behind each application she sees a household, and her insistence that the door opens quickly, accurately, and with care has set the standard the program now strives to meet; and
WHEREAS, Nancy Geist Giacomini of CORA Services / Good Shepherd Mediation serves as the Senior Program Manager for the Eviction Diversion Program and leads the program’s Landlord Liaison work. She also oversees the program’s mediation work, drawing on her many years of experience as a mediator, including for the Eviction Diversion Program, before she joined the staff. Day in and day out she helps landlords and their representatives, from small mom-and-pop property owners to the staff of large corporations and the lawyers of major law firms, understand how the program works, participate effectively, and find their footing through situations that can be confusing, contentious, and high-stakes; and
WHEREAS, Like her colleagues, Ms. Giacomini took on the work of building the Portal on top of her full responsibilities. Her focus across the project was the experience of landlords and their representatives, anticipating where they would be confused, advocating for clear communications, and ensuring that the program’s mediation pathway and its connections to housing counselors and other supports would function reliably for everyone involved; and
WHEREAS, Ms. Giacomini consistently brought attention to risks and edge cases that others might have missed, surfacing problems that affected real participants in real time, and proposing thoughtful, creative solutions during the complex transition between the program’s old and new systems. She was also ever mindful of the need to provide a seamless experience for the dozens of pro bono mediators without whom the program would not function. Her vigilance helped ensure that no participant fell through the cracks during the launch and that the work of the mediators was able to continue unimpeded; and
WHEREAS, Across her years with the program, Ms. Giacomini has been the steady voice landlords find on the other end of the line, translating a complex system into terms each one can act on, whether they own a single rowhouse or manage a portfolio across the city. She came to this work as a mediator, and she has brought a mediator’s instinct for clarity and fairness to every part of it; and
WHEREAS, None of the three honorees are employees of the City of Philadelphia. They are community partners, at Philadelphia Legal Assistance and at CORA Services / Good Shepherd Mediation, who chose, again and again, to extend themselves beyond what any job description required of them. Just as the Eviction Diversion Program has always been built on the feedback of the people who use it, tenants, landlords, advocates, mediators, attorneys, and counselors, these three honorees turned their own deep listening into the design and refinement of the Portal. Their commitment to the participants of the program, and to the program’s success as a whole, is what made the launch of the Portal possible; and
WHEREAS, The contributions recognized here are part of a much larger collective effort. Many colleagues at CORA Services / Good Shepherd Mediation, Philadelphia Legal Assistance, Community Legal Services, the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation, the City of Philadelphia, and additional partner organizations devoted themselves to the Eviction Diversion Program and the development of its new Portal, and they share equally in the gratitude this resolution expresses; now, therefore, be it
RESOLVED, THAT THE COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, Honors Leo Elliot, Susan Layne, and Nancy Geist for their skillful and committed work in making the Eviction Diversion Program Portal possible and their nationally-recognized success in keeping thousands of Philadelphians in their homes.
FURTHER RESOLVED, That three Engrossed copies of this resolution be presented to Leo Elliot, Susan Layne, and Nancy Geist Giacomini as an expression of the gratitude and admiration of the Council of the City of Philadelphia.
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