The Road Ahead

It will be obvious to anyone visiting this site for the first time that I am a novice in the field of mediation. In fact, the reason I started this blog was to share a record of my journey on this long and never ending road towards mediator competence. The 132 hours of training I received through the Certificate in Dispute Resolution Program at York University in 2001 has served me well, and I was very fortunate to take an elective in my main area of interest, community mediation. Since then I have attended various workshops, including Narrative Mediation with John Winslade at Conrad Grebel University College, been involved as ‘the tech guy’ in the now defunct UCDR, and last November registered my own company, Glanville Mediation Service, and placed local ads for which I’m starting to get calls. To date I have mediated about fifteen cases, and continue to take on new ones regularly, thanks to volunteering my services with local community centres.

From October of 2006, I went through the Victim/Offender Mediation training offered by Conflict Mediation Services of Downsview (and was honoured to have co-mediated Ontario’s first case in this Ministry of Justice Pilot Project. Several other workshops are being offered to supplement our Victim/Offender Training, including defusing hostility, and the CMSD Cross Cultural Training Program. I continue to enjoy reading mediation texts (more on that later), and am subscribed to various mediation blogs (see sidebar). And to start 2008 of right, I rejoined the ADR Institute of Ontario and have already attended two very interesting section meetings, and especially look forward to the ADR Annual Meeting and Conference in Montreal October 17.

Since first venturing into this profession, I have been very impressed by the noble spirit which seems to run through it. There seems a deeply held conviction that mediation is a unique and precious calling that demands nothing less than the very best of all who take up this practice. Of course I am revealing some of my own biases here, in that I adhere to the transformative notions of the mediation process and am a little (lot?) less concerned with the legal and financial side of things. One message that I picked up at a recent ADRIO meeting was that to be successful, mediators have to develop their own special niche. This will take considerable time and experience, but I’m beginning to sense the direction in which I want to move. One thing is certain; the learning process never ends, whether it’s through mediations, training programs, readings, meetings or simply observing life’s daily interactions. I am truly delighted to have taken this path, and look forward to all the opportunities that lie ahead.

A strong passion… will insure success, for the desire of the end will point out the means. – William Hazlitt