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Hi friends,

Spring is a time of renewal, and we are renewing our commitment to community mediation with our first-ever Community Mediators Program! We are excited to be able to train a whole new cohort of mediators this month and we are grateful for the diverse experiences (and nearly 10 languages) that our cohort can bring to mediation!

With this cohort, CDSC has now trained over 1,000 people so far this fiscal year, a more than 50% increase from last year, and that is in addition to the increase in cases mediated and conflict resolution services provided. Overall, we have already served hundreds more people than last year, with one month left to go in the fiscal year. This has been possible thanks to our committed CDSC staff and our incredible CDSC mediators. We hope you will enjoy our volunteer spotlight this month—we are excited to be able to expand our roster!

One other exciting update: after 6 months of work, the CDSC Community Consulting Teams (CCT) Boston working group presented their findings to CDSC Board and staff with a focus on how we can improve the way we communicate the important work we do to our various stakeholders. More to follow on some of their findings which we are looking forward to sharing!

In the meantime, we are wishing everyone a beautiful rest of spring and start to summer and we look forward to seeing you soon!

Onward,
Pedro Spivakovsky-Gonzalez
Executive Director

CDSC launches a Community Mediators Program!

We are excited to have launched our first-ever Community Mediators Program this month to recruit new and diverse mediators! Our program participants have backgrounds in communications and translation, hospitality, have worked in faith communities and the medical field, among many other walks of life. Our program participants have fluency in Spanish, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, American Sign Language, and Hebrew, and are starting with a free Basic Mediation Training to learn essential mediation skills. Afterwards, they will have the chance to shadow and start to co-mediate along other experienced mediators on our roster, and will join our roster for at least a year.

It was wonderful to get to meet our talented and diverse trainees when our Basic Mediation Training started earlier this month, and we look forward to watching the cohort members get to know each other and integrate with the CDSC community.

Thank you, Community Consulting Teams Boston!

Since January we have been thrilled to work with a fabulous group of volunteers from the Community Consulting Teams of Boston (CCT). They have been looking at a variety of CDSC processes and giving us tips to increase our non- court mediation cases. They have sent out surveys to volunteers and clients, conducted interviews and researched other mediation-related organizations to see how they present themselves. They have made efforts to include our mediators, board members, staff and clients, and developed elevator pitches which will help us to more effectively communicate what we do to a variety of groups. We recently wrapped up the group’s work with a final presentation to our board.

Thank you so much to our rock strong volunteer team, and we look forward to seeing what we can do with all of the wonderful insights you have provided us!

Director of Youth Programs returns

If you’ve tried to email our Director of Youth Programs since last November, you know that she’s been out on leave. We are excited that she has returned from leave this month, as we missed her insights and contributions to our team. Daniele works Monday, Thursday and Friday.

And that’s a wrap on our roundtables (for now)!

On May 15 we had our last roundtable before we take a short hiatus for the summer. Since October, we’ve seen CDSC volunteers, Boston mediation community members and generous academics with no previous connection to CDSC donate their time for these hour-long, virtual lunchtime presentations and discussions. We’ve talked about whether private sessions should be done before joint sessions in mediations, tackled ethics and bias in mediation, and looked at whether mediation was equitable for poorer participants. We’re always happy to see how engaged CDSC and non-CDSC community members are with our presenters.

If you use our roundtables for your continuing education or just enjoy attending, we’ll be back in the fall with a new set of topics!

Volunteer Spotlight: Diane Roseman

One of CDSC’s newer mediators, Diane Roseman has always been interested in how people resolve conflicts. But it was seeing a CDSC mediator featured in a New York Times article in 2024 that inspired Diane to finally take Basic Mediation Training. She found the listening and reflecting used in mediation natural after a career in health research and counseling, fitness and political advocacy. Although she trained with Metrowest Mediation, Diane decided to volunteer with CDSC because it was closer to home for her.

Diane has always encouraged her children to do something for their body, mind and soul. She tries to embody this herself through a variety of volunteer roles, including work with refugees that is more practical and material, volunteer work around reproductive issues which can be emotional and fraught, and her work as a volunteer mediator, which for her fits the cerebral/mind aspect. Although she is still discovering a mediation specialty, it was immediately obvious to Diane that mediation is “an opportunity. It is providing a service, but also a growth opportunity. I would encourage people to try it.”