May 2018 President’s Message from Dr. Jack Goetz, Esq.
Dear colleagues
“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” These words, uttered by the great American Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s “color line” years before the landmark case of Brown vs. Board of Education and decades before the civil rights movement, has special significance for those of us in conflict resolution who are constantly devoting ourselves to impacting lives in positive ways. These words resonated with us as SCMA’s sister organization, Kids Managing Conflict (KMC), hosted dozens of southern California peer mediation program administrators and coaches at its April 26 Symposium on Kids Managing Conflict: Creating Peace on Our Schools Through Dispute Resolution Programs at the California Endowment for the Arts. As Sally Patchen, KMC’s President, noted in her opening remarks, peer mediators have a statistically significant impact on conflict reduction in the schools. SCMA congratulates KMC at its first annual conference of its kind and looks forward to continuing to support KMC’s great work in the community.
SCMA’s own 6th Annual Celebration of Peer Mediation, hosted by SCMA’s immediate Past President Jason Harper, is being held on May 3 at 6 p.m. at the Galen Center at the USC campus. This conference will enable you to hear from student peer mediators and professionals in discussing best practices in peer mediation. Please join us; you cannot beat the $0 cost. You may register at: https://www.scmediation.org/scma-calendar/npe-events/?eid=4361
April finished our initial webinar series to help you build you mediation practices, as past SCMA President Wendy Kramer delivered the very popular webinar on “Tips on Building a Financially Successful Mediation Practice.” If you missed one or more of our Building your Mediation Practice series, and would like to watch a recorded copy, they are available on our website. You may see them at https://www.scmediation.org/webinars/
May brings us our extremely popular annual Employment Mediation Institute. The conference theme this year is “On the Front Lines: How Mediators can Help Heal Workplaces in the #METOO Era.” There is still room to register for this event and discounted “early bird” registration is available through May 4. The panoply of speakers includes some renown employment mediators and speakers, with introductory remarks by Professor Lisa Klerman of USC Gould School of Law. The full schedule of speakers and panels is at https://www.scmediation.org/employment-mediation-institute-2018/, including Cherry-Marie B. Destura, of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and Harold Coleman, Jr. of the American Arbitration Association’s Mediation.org. Thank you to President-elect Angela Reddock-Wright and conference chair Samantha Blake for putting together this outstanding lineup of speakers.
And those of you who are in Family Law will not want to miss our two-day Family Mediation Institute in Orange County on June 8-9. Keynote speaker and author Dr. Sam Alibrando heads an all-star lineup of family mediation professionals divided into various panels; a larger description of the program is located at https://www.scmediation.org/family-mediation-institute-2018/ Thank you to Board member Terri Breer and Communications Chair Susan Guthrie and the host of others who have dedicated their time to putting this exciting new conference together.
As you can see from the above, your volunteer Board and committees are dedicated to continuing to add value to your membership. In addition to the above activities, there are a host of others, including our monthly professional development groups. We welcome your comments and contributions and thank you for your continued support.
Yours truly
Dr. Jack R. Goetz, Esq.
Jack Goetz
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