Supporting Self-Determination Through Deep Listening

What does it mean to believe in party capacity to resolve their own disputes? How do we as mediators uphold party self-determination or inadvertently displace it? These principles are at the heart of many modalities of mediation, and New York State explicitly lays out self-determination as one its core values for court annexed mediators.
 
This workshop will delve into this crucial value and its relation to party capacity. We invite all mediators to share their processes, reflect on how interventions or lack of interventions impact party agency, and discuss ways to strengthen their practice to support self-determination. In a combination of small breakout groups and a larger discussion, we will explore why self-determination matters to parties and why supporting party choice is fundamental regardless of a mediator’s modality.
 
We dedicate this workshop to the legacy of Baruch Bush, a co-founder of Transformative Mediation, who stressed that human beings have the inherent capacity to resolve conflict. Bush shared a new idea of what success means. That instead of reaching settlement, success in mediation is a change in the quality of a conflict interaction, a process of shifts in how parties experience both themselves (empowerment) and each other (recognition). Indications of parties’ capacity to care for themselves and each other emerge when mediators engage in a practice of deep listening, with humility and without assumptions. We lay the groundwork for these shifts by creating a setting where people trust that they have real agency in this process (self-determination).
 
Participants will leave the training with a clear sense of how their practice supports party self-determination and a greater understanding of how parties bring their own capacity to mediation. They’ll also leave with ideas on how to strengthen areas of practice where they may curtail party agency.

About Hannah Diamond, J.D.

Hannah Diamond is a mediator and trainer based out of Brooklyn NY. She mediates for several NY rosters and the CCRB and is a Part 146 Approved Trainer. Hannah is a certified transformative mediator and is passionate about mediation as a way for people to feel empowered in difficult situations. She teaches mediation at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, and has a J.D from Harvard Law School.

About Kim Pesenti, M.A.

In 2019, Kim received basic mediation and custody/visitation training through the Center for Dispute Settlement in Rochester, New York and began mediating through the Community Dispute Resolution Center in Ithaca in 2020. She is a certified community dialogue facilitator through the Institute of Study for Conflict Transformation and a NYSDRA certified conflict coach. She is an active member at ISCT, participating in multiple projects and trainings. Her approach as a transformative practitioner is also informed by her previous work at the Center for Nonviolent Education and Parenting in Los Angeles. Kim was introduced to transformative, restorative and trauma sensitive practices during her time at CNVEP as a parent practitioner, parent educator and staff member. She holds a M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Memphis.