Past meetings and events
June 15, 2012: NE-ACR's Summer Institute, held at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, featured Joe Brummer, longtime trainer and leader of Community Mediation in New Haven, discussing "Secrets of a Successful Workshop: Design and Delivery." Through interactive exercises and slide presentations, Joe talked about making content fit the client's real needs, using technology to give in-the-moment feedback, and dealing with "snipers" and "hijackers."
April 19, 2012: At the chapter's Annual Meeting and Elections, following a brief business meeting and the election of new directors and officers, Tammy Lenski, an author, teacher, and former NE-ACR board member, orchestrated a lively discussion titled "On Being Relevant: How We Describe What We Do." Using Open Space Technology to focus discussions on various topics, Lenski encouraged those present to explore, challenge, and think creatively about the language and labels we use and whether they're really resonating with the people we'd like to help.
October 27, 2011: NE-ACR's fall event featured a discussion on the essential role that dignity plays in conflict resolution, with speaker Donna Hicks of Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
June 17-18, 2011: NE-ACR's regional conference at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, offered a welcome address by Matthew Freeman, who specializes in using audience response technology to find common ground and build consensus; a keynote address on Neurobiology and Empathy by Stevenson Carlebach of the Harvard Program on Negotiation; 16 workshops and seminars; and a reception at which NE-ACR's leaders presented the chapter's Pioneer Award to Susanne Terry, a longtime champion of dispute resolution, beloved teacher, and founder of the Woodbury Institute, now part of Champlain College, in Burlington, Vermont. Saturday saw a master class, taught by Eben Weitzman, director of the Graduate Program in Dispute Resolution at UMass Boston, on understanding and managing conflict in work teams.
April 20, 2011: NE-ACR's Annual Meeting and Elections provided a brief business meeting, election of new board members and officers for the April 2011-April 2012 term, and, as part of NE-ACR's continuing discussion about certification, a conversation about mediator excellence with Lou Gieszl, president of ACR and deputy director of MACRO, which has pioneered efforts to assure that people in Maryland get high-quality conflict resolution services.
October 5, 2010: NE-ACR's Fall Meeting featured Susanne Terry and Ericka Gray discussing the sometimes-contentious topic of certifying mediators. Terry, who is at the forefront of ACR's new efforts to craft standards for programs that certify programs and launch a pilot project that will certify divorce mediators in the association's Family Section, described both efforts and her own changes in thinking about the topic over the years. Gray, who also has been following the decades-long debate, clarified terms about licensure, certification (getting a certificate from a training, for example, does not mean being "certified"), and credentialing.
June 25, 2010: NE-ACR's Summer Institute, Wellesley Free Library, Wellesley, MA. Members of StageCoach Improv, a professional troupe, guided participants through a series of improvisational exercises designed to help conflict resolution professionals improve their skills by staying in the moment, thinking on their feet, remembering the impact of non-verbal communication, keeping a positive outlook, and making others look good.
April 6, 2010: NE-ACR's Annual Meeting at the Wellesley Free Library in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The election of directors and officers was followed by a presentation on facilitation by Jack Wofford of Cambridge and Ona Ferguson of the Consensus Building Institute in Cambridge.
