30th Annual BISC-MI Conference

Dates: November 10, 11, 12, 2026

AT THE KENSINGTON HOTEL – Ann Arbor, Michigan!

Conference Description: For three decades, the Battering Intervention Services Coalition of Michigan (BISC-MI) has hosted one of the most respected gatherings in the field of domestic violence  and battering intervention programs (BIPs). This year’s 30th Anniversary Conference is more than a milestone; it is a moment to come together, reflect on the roots of this work, and shape what comes next.

Inspired by the phenomenon of murmuration, when hundreds of birds move together in powerful, coordinated patterns, this conference celebrates what becomes possible when passionate professionals gather, share insights, challenge one another, and move forward collectively.

Over three information-packed  days, participants will engage with leading voices in the field, explore innovative program strategies, strengthen coordinated community responses, and deepen practices that promote accountability, responsibility, and victim safety. Just as importantly, those who join us will connect with a national community of colleagues who understand both the challenges and the profound importance of this work.

Whether you are a seasoned practitioner, or new to this work,this gathering offers the rare opportunity to learn, reconnect, be inspired, and leave energized with new ideas and relationships that will strengthen your work and your community. Our conferences are attended by participants representing a large range of disciplines, including BIP providers, survivor programs, probation officers, judges, law enforcement, counselors, child welfare, and others working in this field. 

This is the conference where our movement gathers and we learn from each other!

Join us as we celebrate 30 years of leadership, learning, and collaboration, and help shape the next chapter of intervention work together, nationwide and internationally.

Roots. Wings. Beyond.
We hope to see you here!

Note: Conference is Eastern Time (ET)
Pre-Conference: Monday, November 9, 2026

8:00 pm-9:30 pm ET Conference Check-In: At the registration area near the Grand Ballroom in Kensington hotel in Ann Arbor.

Day One: Tuesday, November 10, 2026

8:30 am – 9:30 am ET Registration and Continental Breakfast Provided

9:30 am – 10:00 am ET Welcome: Welcome to the BISC-MI 30th Annual Conference

10:00-11:30 am ET PANEL: Coming In Through the Front Door
Description: As we gather for BISC-MI’s 30th Annual Conference to learn, share, connect, and celebrate, we are also called to reflect on who may still be missing from these spaces. This conversation invites us to consider how we can continue expanding participation in BIP work among clients, providers, and the broader community.

While these discussions may feel challenging at times, they are necessary. We must recognize that our past efforts and existing assumptions have not always been enough to create programs and environments that are truly inclusive, relevant, safe, accessible, and welcoming for everyone. Together, we will explore both the large and small actions that can help transform our intentions into meaningful, lasting change.
Panelists: Juan Carlos Areán, Desiree Coyote, Shon Hart, Christy Stillwell, and Teferi Brent
Facilitator: Jeffrie Cape, BISC-MI Board Chair
SESSION MATERIALS:

11:30 am – 11:45 pm ET Break

11:45 am – 12:45 pm ET A foundation’s approach to reaching people who cause harm
Description: This session will describe the work of the Michael Reese Health Trust, a Chicago area foundation that prioritizes preventing domestic violence by focusing on people who cause harm. Central to this work is publication of a report in 2026 entitled, “Reaching People Who Cause Harm: A Landscape Scan of Policies, Funding and Strategies to Prevent Intimate Partner Violence in Cook County”. This session will explain how the foundation selected working with people who cause harm as a priority area, share the report’s major findings along with other work the foundation has engaged in to strengthen the local service sector, and share tips for securing funding from foundations.
Faculty: Jennifer Rosenkranz and Callie Kaplan
SESSION MATERIALS:

12:45 pm – 1:45 pm ET Lunch Buffet Provided (Door Prizes)

1:45 pm – 3:15 pm ET

Stories of Hope: The Importance of Creating Community in Group
Description: This workshop will focus on the importance of group members finding community with one another. When emotional dependence is distributed across a broader support network, it becomes safer for participants’ partners and models caring and compassion. In addition, participants can discuss topics and experiences that could lead to a probation violation with other men in the group, creating opportunities for support, accountability, and problem-solving.
Faculty: Alyce LaViolette
SESSION MATERIALS:

3:15 pm – 3:30 pm ET Break

3:30 pm – 5:00 pm ET  Transgender Cultural Fluency
Description: Our Transgender Cultural Fluency Training is designed to increase participants’ knowledge, awareness, and confidence when interacting with and supporting transgender people. Participants will explore key concepts related to gender identity, examine common myths and misconceptions, and discuss practical strategies for creating more inclusive and affirming environments. The training lays the foundation for participants to gain a better understanding of what it means to be transgender, learn common vocabulary, clarify common misconceptions about transgender people, become familiar with the challenges transgender communities face, and learn ways to be a strong and engaged advocate for transgender people.
Faculty: Adrian Lawyer
SESSION MATERIALS:

5:00 pm – 6:30 pm ET PANEL: Talked Over, Second-Guessed, Still Here:  Lived experiences of Female and Non-binary Practitioners in this Work
Description: What is it like to be the only woman in the room of a batterer intervention group where everyone else is a man? What does co-facilitation actually look like across differences of gender identity, race, and sexual orientation? In this panel, women and non-binary people who work with men in batterer intervention and the broader domestic violence field speak candidly about their lived experience—co-facilitating men’s groups and holding men accountable—while navigating a field whose power, privilege, and leadership remain predominantly cis-gender, male, heterosexual, and white. Panelists will name the reality of being talked over, second-guessed, and having their expertise discounted, alongside the central irony of our work: that we demand accountability, equality and equity from the men in our groups while too often failing to confront the same entitlement, power, and privilege within our own field. How does gender socialization and sexist bias show up in our own work?  This conversation will also turn inward, examining how power and privilege—and marginalization and entitlement—operate among women themselves. This session will include an honest conversation with doing accountability work inside structures that don’t hold themselves to the standard they set.  The session will also include anonymous Menti polling for the audience to share their thoughts and a reflective discussion.
Panel Members: TBD
Faculty Moderator: Melissa Scaia
SESSION MATERIALS:

6:30 pm – 8:30 pm ET Dinner on your own

8:30 pm – 9:30 pm ET Cookies & Chat (for in-person attendees only)
Description: In-person conference attendees are encouraged to continue discussion from the days events.

Day Two: Wednesday, November 11, 2026

8:30 am – 9:30 am ET Registration and Continental Breakfast Provided

9:30 am – 10:00 am ET Welcome:

10:00 am – 11:30 am ET PANEL: Force, Context, and Change: A Conversation with Women’s Nonviolence Program Participants
Description: This session brings practitioners into direct conversation with women who have used violence against an intimate partner and/or who have completed a women’s nonviolence program. Rather than talking about these women, the session creates space to listen to them — what brought them to use force, what they experienced in the legal and intervention systems, and what helped or hindered their work toward nonviolence.

A central thread runs through the discussion: what happens when context is left out. When courts, evaluators, child protection workers, and even intervention programs treat all use of force as interchangeable — applying frameworks built for predominant aggressors to women whose violence is resistive, reactive, or rooted in their own victimization — the consequences for women are serious and often compounding. Women can be misidentified as the predominant aggressor, lose time with or custody of their children, be funneled into programs that don’t fit their situation, and have their own experiences of abuse erased in the process. A nonviolence program and CCR that fails to account for context can mirror these same harms, holding women to an accountability narrative that doesn’t match the reality of their lives.

Through facilitated dialogue, this session invites advocates, BIP facilitators, and Women Who Use Force facilitators to hear how these dynamics land for the women who live them, and to reflect on how their own practice — in the group room, in court, and in coordinated community response — can either reinforce or interrupt the loss women experience when context is ignored.
Panel members: TBD
Faculty: Melissa Scaia
SESSION MATERIALS:

11:30-11:45 am ET Break  

11:45 am – 1:15 pm ET One Group. Different Wounds. Different Realities: Moving Beyond One-Size-Fits-All Intervention
Description: Men and women entering intervention programs often share similar labels but carry very different stories, trauma histories, and pathways to harm. In this session we will explore lessons learned from serving both men and women,  challenging one size fits all approaches to batterer intervention services.
Faculty: Shon Hart
SESSION MATERIALS:

1:15 pm – 2:15 pm ET Lunch Buffet Provided (Door Prizes)

2:15 pm – 2:45 pm ET Awards Ceremony

The COMPASS Award: Michael Reese Health Trust
The Michigan ICON Award: Peaty Hershberger
Champion Award: Alyce LaViolette

2:45 pm – 4:15 pm ET Partner Abuse Intervention Programs process model: A framework for expanding measures of success.
Description: This presentation will provide an overview of the development of an enhanced evaluation tool for Partner Abuse Intervention Programs (PAIPs). First, we will review a new model for thinking about how PAIPs work, and the processes occurring in such programs that are important for affecting change. This model is rooted in the research on PAIPs and in the perspectives and insights of PAIP facilitators, program managers, and scholars, as well as victims’ advocates from across the country. It provides a framework for expanding our definition of “success” for programs by outlining the complex set of variables and processes that often get overlooked in traditional evaluations of PAIPs. Next, we discuss how we are using this model to build out an enhanced evaluation tool for programs that is low-cost, user-friendly and easily tailored/adaptable to meet specific program needs, modalities, etc. Lastly, we will present our long-term objectives related to PAIP evaluation and the need to build greater infrastructure across the country for supporting programs and the invaluable work they do.
Faculty: Penelope Morrison & Rich Tolman
SESSION MATERIALS: 

4:15 pm – 4:30 pm ET Break  

4:30 pm – 6:00 pm ET A Heart for the Community – A First Nation Members Experience
Description: Words, phrases, and statements often serve as shorthand for the knowledge and skills we use every day, both in life and at work. Terms like “wraparound services,” “diversity,” “culture,” “data,” “inclusive,” and others—such as “safety,” “voluntary,” and “accountability”, are frequently used in broad, general ways. But what do these words actually mean in practice? How do they connect to our real, lived experiences?

Let’s take a closer look at these broad terms and explore the realities behind them. As we do so, consider your own perspective: What is your “why” for addressing or ending violence? What personal experiences or motivations drive you to engage in this work?
Faculty: Desiree Coyote
SESSION MATERIALS:

6:00 pm – 8:00 pm ET Dinner on your own

8:00 pm – 9:00 pm ET Cookies & Chat (for in-person attendees only)
Description: In-person conference attendees are encouraged to continue discussion from the days events.

Day Three: Thursday, November 12, 2026

8:30 am – 9:30 am ET Registration and Continental Breakfast Provided

9:30 am – 10:00 am ET Welcome: 

10:00 am – 11:30 am ET This is Where I Learned Not to Sleep – Quest for Justice, Journey Towards Healing
Description: Domestic violence has an evident and long-term impact on adult victims as well as children who witness violence. This keynote/plenary presentation will explore the complex relationship between childhood exposure to family violence, policing, and efforts to break the cycle of violence. The film “This is Where I Learned Not to Sleep” follows retired Nashville (TN) Lieutenant Mark Wynn as he revisits his haunting childhood through his work to reform police response to family violence. Lt. Wynn started the first domestic violence division in the Nashville Metropolitan Police Department and presents his quest for justice and journey towards healing while providing effective strategies for police response to family violence. The audience will view the 38 minute video and then the discussion will be moderated by Mark.
Faculty: Mark Wynn
SESSION MATERIALS:

11:30 am – 11:45 am ET Break

11:45 am – 1:15 pm ET Silence, Loyalty, and Collusion: How Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence Are Protected
Description: This presentation examines how silence, minimization, avoidance, and misplaced loyalty can unintentionally reinforce abuse. Grounded in a survivor’s experience, the session challenges men, intervention providers, and community partners to recognize how everyday responses either interrupt harm or protect it. Participants will hear the survivor’s view of strategies that were helpful, harmful, enabling, and necessary for meaningful accountability and safety.
Faculty: Dottie Davis
SESSION MATERIALS:

1:15 pm – 2:15 pm ET Lunch Buffet Provided (Door Prizes)

2:15 pm -3:15 pm ET Discussion: ​Integrating domestic violence intervention into communitues to create systemic sustainable change: 2 communities 2 approaches
Description: Homeboy​ Industries from L​o​s Angeles, CA and the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood and Community Safety, City of Detroit, MI will have a facilitated conversation on how they are each systematically approaching domestic violence.

This engaging conversation will be focused on how safety for families and communities requires creating a multi dimensional community approach to expand and integrate awareness​ and intervention about domestic violence to include a variety of formal and informal touch points.
Faculty: Dr. Kyla Williams, Teferi Brent, Christie Stillwell
Facilitator: Jeffrie Cape, BISC-MI Board Chair
SESSION MATERIALS:

3:15 pm -4:45 pm ET Beyond Mandates: What Motivates People Who Use Violence to Seek Accountability and Change?
Description: This session will explore emerging research on why some people who use violence and coercion seek help and remain engaged in Battering Intervention Programs without system mandates. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with survivors, practitioners, and non-mandated participants, the presentation will examine motivation, accountability, community, and the conditions that support meaningful and sustained change. Participants will consider how survivor-defined accountability, relationships, and community engagement can reshape responses to domestic violence beyond compliance and punishment.
Faculty: Juan Carlos Areán, Ph.D.
SESSION MATERIALS:

4:45 pm ET CONFERENCE CLOSING:  Raffle for 2 Free Registrations for the 2026 BISC-MI Conference (In-Person and Virtual) Must be present to win!

Total Number of CEs for Day Three: 5.5 CEU’s

Total Number of CEs Hours: Day One: 7.0  | Day Two: 6.0  | Day Three: 5.5  | Total for Three Days:  18.5
6.0 Michigan Ethics CEs