NE-ACR Board of Directors
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Melinda Milberg
President
Mindy Milberg is a mediator, arbitrator, trainer, and attorney with a solo practice in Natick, MA, in the areas of divorce, employment, probate, business and personal injury. She serves as an arbitrator on the AAA Employment panel and the NASD panel, and as a mediator with the National Mediation Centers, Boston Bar Association's BMC panel and the Community Dispute Settlement Center. She is an NEACR Board member, President Elect and Co-chair of the Education Committee for NEACR. Mindy Milberg can be reached at 508-655-6800 or by email at milberg@milbergmediation.com
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Louisa Williams
President Elect
Louisa Williams is executive director of the Martha’s Vineyard Mediation Program, Inc., where she’s responsible for case coordination, administration, and mediator education and training. She also mediates small claims, divorce, and family conflict cases for the program. She recently served as co-chair of the Massachusetts Trial Court’s Public Awareness Working Group, which was charged with designing a plan for increasing public awareness of ADR in the Commonwealth. She has been a member of Mediation Works Incorporated’s District Court panel, mediating small claims and summary process cases as a volunteer for that program in New Bedford, Fall River, and Quincy. She graduated from Princeton University and has a master’s in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley. Before moving to the Vineyard, she worked at the Boston Globe, most recently as managing editor for administration.
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Arline Kardasis, BA, MAT
Vice President
Arline Kardasis is a mediator, trainer, conflict coach and founding partner of Agreement Resources, LLC. and Elder Decisions. Her family mediation and conflict coaching practice includes divorce, post-divorce and marital mediation as well as elder mediation. In the workplace environment, Arline consults, coaches and provides conflict resolution trainings and facilitations for employees and managers. In the Massachusetts courts, Arline mediates civil disputes as well as probate cases. She is a mediator for the Boston Bar Association Boston Municipal Court Program and is on several divorce mediation panels. She has written about family mediation for Mediate.com and, with Rikk Larsen, she co-wrote “When Aging Issues Lead to Family Conflict” for Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.
Arline is Vice-President of the New England Chapter of the Association for Conflict Resolution and is the former Newsletter Editor. She is a member of the Massachusetts Council on Family Mediation and serves on the Public Awareness Subcommittee for the Massachusetts Trial Court’s Standing Committee on Dispute Resolution.
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Cary Quigley
Treasurer
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Anita Jones
Secretary
Anita B. Jones entered the field of mediation after taking basic and advanced mediation training at University of Southern Maine in Portland in 1993. She founded Portland’s Community Mediation Center and was Executive Director for five years, ending in 2000. In that capacity she provided training in Victim Offender Conferencing as well as coaching others to start community mediation centers in Maine. She has training in victim-offender, severe and violent victim-offender, family, real estate, civil, divorce and small claims mediation. She has been a guardian ad litem and coaches regularly in the USM mediation classes. She has provided transformational mediation as a volunteer in Youth Alternative’s Family Mediation Program. Anita’s practice now consists mostly of court appointed mediation services, being rostered on the CADRES roster for small claims and family matters cases.
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H. Scott Flegal
Ex-Officio, Non-Voting
H. Scott Flegal is a business lawyer, mediator and consultant whose business is located in Nashua, New Hampshire. His law practice is at Flegal Law Office, P.A., a boutique firm whose practice is focused on representing entrepreneurs, closely held and family businesses. He mediates business cases, facilitates all types of negotiation and teaches negotiation through his related firm, NegotiationWorks, LLC. Attorney Flegal is a 1982 graduate of Amherst College and a 1985 graduate of the DePaul University College of Law. He obtained the bulk of his mediation training at the Harvard Program of Instruction for Lawyers. He has also studied and received training in advanced negotiation at the Harvard Program on Negotiation.
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Walter Bitler
Director
Walt Bitler is a full time mediator and the owner of the Northeast Conflict Resolution Services,LLC. He is a trained mediator, facilitator and arbitrator. He has served as Chairperson of the Consumer Section of the Association for Conflict Resolution for the past 4 years. He is a Certified Professional Mediator and Certified Mediation Trainer (Vermont Mediator Association) and serves on the ABA Dispute Resolution Section as well as the Forum Committee on the Construction Industry. Walt works with the Vermont Superior Court, mediating commercial, contractual, construction and home-owner disputes. He is an approved mediator/arbitrator for the VT State Department of Housing and Community Affairs. He also serves on the Construction Dispute Resolution Services National Panel of Construction ADR Specialist and the CDRS Dispute Review Board and Arbitration Panel.
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Michele Gousie Geremia, MSLR
Director
Michele Gousie Geremia is a Mediator, Trainer and Human Resources Consultant, currently practicing in Bristol, Rhode Island. She is the owner of mouthPEACE mediation. Michele has a Masters Degree in Labor and Industrial Relations with a specialization in Alternative Dispute Resolution from the University of Rhode Island, and a Bachelors Degree in Social Work. She received her mediation training at Mediation Works Inc. in Boston, including general mediation, divorce mediation, and summary process mediation. She has been mediating for 3 years, serving as a volunteer mediator in the small claims courts, predominantly in Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts. Her Human Resource experience of over ten years includes coaching and training on a wide range of workplace issues, including employee morale, team building skills, and employee/management relations. She has experience in a range of environments, including financial, manufacturing and health care. Michele holds the Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) certification. She is an active member of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and the Human Resource Management Association of Rhode Island (HRM-RI).
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Juliana Hoyt, Esq
Director
Juliana Hoyt is a mediator in Vermont and an associate of the Environmental Mediation Center, a non-profit corporation that administers the USDA's Agricultural Mediation Program for the state of Vermont. She coaches beginning and advanced mediation students and participates in trainings for attorneys and associated professionals in the techniques of collaborative law. She helps facilitate workshops that focus on communication and team dynamics. She is also a Massachusetts attorney who most recently worked with Boston Law Collaborative in Boston, MA. Juliana holds a Graduate Certificate in Mediation and Applied Conflict Studies from Woodbury College in Montpelier, VT and is a candidate for a Master's degree in June, 2008. She graduated with honors from both Wellesley College and Boston University School of Law.
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Stephen Linsky
Director
Steve Linsky first entered the field of dispute resolution in 1985 when he served as a staff assistant to the Governor's Blue Ribbon Panel on Alternative Dispute Resolution. He was appointed to the first-ever conciliation panel to the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents (DIA) in 1986. In 1989, he was appointed General Counsel, Special Assistant Attorney General and designated hearing officer, presiding over various administrative hearings. In 1991, he was appointed the department's Acting Commissioner.
Steve opened a private law and mediation practice in 1997. In 2001, he became a founding member of The New Law Center, the first collaborative law firm to form in the Boston area. In 2005, he co-founded Family Co-Mediation, a practice providing co-mediation services to families and businesses. He has served as a trainer and instructor in dispute resolution at various institutions including Lasell College in Newton, Massachusetts and Israel College in Tel Aviv, as an ombudsman to the housing ADR program at the Community Dispute Settlement Center, and as coordinator of the ADR program at Suffolk Superior Court.
Steve is a member of the Massachusetts bar, the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the First Circuit Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supremem Court, ADR subcommittee to the Boston Bar Association, the New England Chapter of the Association for Conflict Resolution, the Massachusetts Association of Mediation Programs and Practitioners, the Massachusetts Council on Family Mediation, the American Arbitration Association, and the Massachusetts Collaborative Law Council. In 2001, he was elected to the Newton Board of Aldermen and presently chair the Board's Community Preservation Committee.
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Roni Lipton
Director
Roni Lipton is currently the Associate Director of the Graduate Programs in Dispute Resolution at UMass Boston; she also serves as a member of the Clinical Faculty, supervising and evaluating student mediators in the District Courts.
Roni has held a variety of positions in both the private and public sectors as a manager, negotiator, mediator and facilitator. As Senior Vice President of American CableSystems Corporation, she managed multi-million dollar business acquisitions and served as lead negotiator for more than 50 municipal contracts in six states.
Roni has been active in the New England ACR community since receiving basic mediation training at Metropolitan Mediation Services in 1993; she has been a voluntee mediator for MWI and worked as Program Coordinator at CDSC in Cambridge where she launched an Elder Care mediation initiative. She currently participates in the Boston Bar Association's Boston Municipal Court ADR program, and frequently conducts workshops on negotiation and conflict management skills for business, professional, and community groups.
Her educational background includes a BS in Political Science from Tufts University, a Diploma in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and an MS from Boston University's College of Communications.
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Joseph Mengacci
Director
Joseph A. Mengacci is the principal of Conflict Solutions Services, LLC and a partner in the Center for Family Mediation and Conflict Resolution, LLC. Joe is a full time mediator & arbitrator. He previously practiced law in Connecticut for approximately 27 years before he was appointed as a Judge of the Superior Court where he served prior to entering full time ADR practice. He is a member of the Alternate Dispute Resolution Section of the Connecticut Bar Association and serves on the Executive Committee. He is a member of the Dispute Resolution Section of the American Bar Association, the Association for Conflict Resolution and the International Ombudsman Association. He is a graduate of LaSalle University and Loyola University School of Law. Joe has served as a director on a number of boards and commissions, including having been the Chairman of the Judicial Selection Commission and a trustee on the Board of Trustees of the Connecticut State University System.
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Neal Rodar
Director
Neal has been mediating for 12 years and has just left his position as the Director of the Woodbury Dispute Resolution Center after ten years. Board and Committee memberships include; The Professional Responsibility Board (Vt. Supreme Court), Oversight Committee of the Vermont Family Court Mediation Program, Vermont Environmental Court Mediation Program. He is contracted to mediate with the Vermont Human Rights Commission, Vermont’s Dept of Education, and the Vermont Family Court Mediation Program. Neal has worked extensively with State Government developing mediations programs and was appointed in 2002 to be Vermont’s Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) ambassador to a conference of State Governments by then Chief Justice Amestoy. For the last four years Neal has worked closely with Vermont’s Probate Judges and The Center for Social Gerontology to develop a mediation program dealing with Elder Care and Adult Guardianship issues.
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Ruth Rosenberg, JD
Director
Ruthy Kohorn Rosenberg, J.D. is the Student Mediation Coordinator in the Office of Student Mediation and Community Standards at MIT. Her office is charged with developing mediation programs for the 6,000 graduate students and 4,000 undergraduates and the faculty and staff who work with them, and developing programming and educational oppportunities around conflict resolution. Ruthy has more than 20 years experience as a mediator, teacher, university administrator, non-profit director and consultant. She was the Director of Family Mediation Services at the Cleveland Mediation Cneter, and Assistant Dean, Academic Affairs in the Division of Biology and Medicine at Brown University. She has trained and supervised mediators and has mediated divorce, custody, community, and inter-and intra-organizational disputes in a wide variety of settings. Ruthy has a law degree from the University of Connecticut School of Law and a Certificate in Non Profit Management from Case Western Reserve University.
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Madison Thompson
Director
Madison (Matt) Thompson has worked for the past twenty-seven years in the areas of conflict resolution, diversity, and cultural competency. He has worked with large, regional banking institutions, higher education institutions, and major teaching hospitals as well local banks and community non-profit agencies.
A 1974 graduate of the Northeastern University Physician Assistant Program, Matt has sixteen years experience as a Physician Assistant coupled with ten years in the military health care system. As a candidate for the Master of Arts in Dispute Resolution at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Matt has refined his expertise in cross-cultural mediation issues and regularly trains staff, managers, supervisors and higher education faculty in dealing with a diverse community and student body.
Matt's community activity and work has included such diverse organizations as Dimock Community Health Center, South Boston Neighborhood House, Fitchburg State College, Fields Corner Community Development Corporation and Dorchester People for Peace . Certified in Facilitative Leadership®, Matt is also an Affiliate of the Interaction Institute for Social Change based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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