UPDATE: This seminar occurred in the past. View the complete list of upcoming seminars to discover live programs that are available now.
Mediation of Family and Divorce Conflicts is a five-day program that meets the IACP standards for Basic Training of Collaborative Professionals and is one of only two programs in Canada to be approved by the Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR). The program, which began in 1989, is the longest running legal education program in mediation.
Who Is It For?
In addition to training lawyers and judges, the Mediation of Family and Divorce Conflicts program is designed to assist helping professionals, such as counsellors, therapists, social workers, clergy, and educators, to become professional mediators.
Dr. Larry Fong, a practicing psychologist, mediator, and arbitrator, is one of the instructors, and has been teaching the interest based facilitative model since 1982. He believes the program is popular because it attracts a wide variety of professionals.
“It is this harmonic range of different professionals – who provide the greatest ability to understand different perspectives – that makes this program successful. Attendees have come from the United States, Holland and Switzerland and include judges, psychologists, lawyers, teachers, police officers, members of the cloth, politicians and many other professionals,” explains Dr. Fong.
Of the lawyers who take the program, some of the likely reasons are:
- They want to augment their practice with mediation, whether the mediation be as a sole mediator, or in using the skills in settlement meetings.
- They want to use this specific course for their collaborative law training.
- They want to complete the mediation component in arbitration.
Common Goal of Mediation
The Mediation of Family and Divorce Conflicts program helps professionals who work with families, which as Dr. Fong has discovered, is one of the most unpredictable areas of mediation due to high conflict, strong emotions, and most likely, psychological difficulties.
“As I travel throughout the world – in at least 15 countries – I find that the goal of many of those in conflict use many different forms of mediation with all the same goal – to assist children and family with conflict,” says Dr. Fong. “Although there are many models, the interest based facilitative model is still the most known, and it has helped me teaching in different areas, including business mediation in Switzerland, for example.”
Five Days of Intensive Learning
The five-day program includes:
- Demonstration of the mediation process
- Videotaped presentations
- Lecture and discussion
- Extensive participant simulation exercises with trainer feedback
- Informal individual consultations
- Extensive course materials
- Outlines of the mediation process
- Detailed checklists of the issues to be addressed
For more information about the Mediation of Family and Divorce Conflicts training program, other LESA live events, educational resources, and CPLED Program, visit www.lesa.org.
