IACP Updates and Happenings

Toronto Forum

We are busy planning the 2023 Forum. Mark your calendars for October 19 to 22, 2023 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Remember to ensure your passport will be valid and not expired!  Our theme this year is “Change the Future. Collaborate.”  This is a special year for forward-thinking and we know our members have a lot of great ideas.  We have had a huge number of awesome PFI proposals and workshop proposals and have had a hard time choosing between all the excellent proposals. I know that this is going to be an excellent event. Thank you to those of you who submitted a proposal.

The first change you will see is the Forum schedule.  We will have a full day of Pre-Forum Institutes on October 19 and the Forum workshops start Friday morning.  We will still have a great party on Saturday night but, we end on Sunday morning with a farewell breakfast and off everyone goes to start applying all they have learned!  When looking at flights and planning your trip, please keep this in mind.

You can now reserve your sponsorship place and further contribute to making this an outstanding event. We are offering many more sponsorship opportunities this year with more levels. Please look at our offerings and take advantage of this opportunity before they are gone. Here is a link to our sponsorship pages.

Membership Growth - Join In!

We continue to expand the movement globally after a successful pilot program in Malaysia that doubled our membership in that region! We are working to establish similar programs in Brazil and New Zealand as part of our commitment to expansion and inclusion. The Pan American Task Force is working diligently to support connections with IACP in areas where the Collaborative Movement is expanding, like Argentina and Panama. North American Practice Groups are also seeing membership growth in California, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and British Columbia, to name a few.

We welcomed three new Whole Groups: Nebraska Academy of Collaborative Professionals, New Look Collaborative Practice Group, and North Carolina Collaborative Attorney Network (NC-CAN) to our ever-growing list of Whole Groups! Did you know that you can save on membership fees by being a member of a Whole Group? By becoming a Whole Group all members of your Practice Group share in the many IACP member benefits and assures your community has the advantage of the best Collaborative practitioners. And now we’ve added another benefit by including a free individual membership for group administrators!  Email your Practice Group now to get the ball rolling so you can enjoy the many benefits of membership with the deep discount in fees. Not sure if you are still a member of a Whole Group? Reach out to dolores@collaborativepractice.com.  

Travel to Practice Groups

My family and I often include visits to Practice Groups during our travel and recently I was able to meet with IACP members in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Syndey (Australia) and Boca Raton (Florida, USA). Common among all these communities is a passion to help families and a desire to open more Collaborative cases. It is universal. Everyone loves doing these cases and wants to do more of them. It is so inspiring to meet so many peacemakers from around the world who are using Collaborative Practice to bring peace to families everywhere. As a member of IACP, you are a member of a global community of good people doing important work.

Below are photos of the groups I met in Malaysia and Australia.

Thank you so much for your efforts to bring peace to the world, one family at a time.

In Community,

Brian Galbraith

IACP Board President

This program will introduce listeners to the central concepts discussed in the book, Navigating Emotional Currents in Collaborative Divorce: A Guide to Enlightened Team Practice (ABA 2011). Why are some clients a pleasure to work with, and find the Collaborative process to be transformational? Why are others so challenging, and seem to resist logic and wise options despite effective work by the professionals? How can each professional, and each team as a whole, create a sense of safety and cohesion within our relationships that will support clients’ capacity to compromise? The answers to these and other questions can be understood by examining fundamental psychological concepts and applying them – in plain language that we all can understand – to all aspects of our work in Collaborative divorce cases.

Presented by: Lisa Herrick, Ph.D. and Kate Scharff, LCSW

Date: May 1, 2023

Start time: 5:00 PM PDT, mid-day May 2 in the Southern Hemisphere (check your local time here)

Length of Webinar: 60 minutes

Price: FREE for IACP Members (please login to your account before registering!); $50 for non-members

This webinar will highlight the continual changing landscape of issues and concerns for the LGBTQI Community and how best collaborative professionals and the collaborative process can help these families.

Presented by: Concetta G. Spirio, Adam B. Cordover and Kathy Campbell

Date: May 17, 2023

Start time: 9:00 AM PDT (check your local time here)

Length of Webinar: 60 minutes

Price: FREE for IACP Members (please login to your account before registering!); $50 for non-members

IACP is pleased to present 2023 Seminar Series: Keeping You on Top: Avoiding the Collaborative Avalanche, presented by Deborah K. Gilman, Ph.D.

The goal of this course is to help professionals make an informed assessment of avalanche danger and make smart decisions to minimize the chances of having to deal with an avalanche and know what to do in the event one occurs to dig out from the collapse.

Learning objectives for this seminar are as follows:

• BACKCOUNTRY BASICS: RECOGNIZING AVALANCHE TERRAIN
  Participants will gain insight into his/her/their own personal experiences and share with others to begin linking outside our own practice bubbles.
• ANCHORS OR OBSTACLES? Participants will focus on process management, using resistance and “debris” the clients give off to move the process forward.
• STRENGTHENING YOUR “BACKCOUNTRY” BRAIN: Participants will get a crash course in the Neuroscience of conflict. Participants will learn the biology behind the way that the brain processes conflict, so that they can experience conflict with a clear mind and learn to make effective choices.
• PACKING YOUR PERSONAL AVALANCHE SURVIVAL KIT: Strategies for building resilience and equanimity will be explored so that each individual develops his/her/their self-care plan for maintaining professional quality of life.
  

Dates & times:  

• May 15, 19, 22 and 26, 2023: 7:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT (check your local time here)
  

Pricing:

• IACP members: US$500
• Non-IACP members: US$550

This seminar is limited to 30 participants. Additional interested parties will be added to a waitlist and contacted by IACP if a space becomes available. 

Participants are expected to participate in ALL online sessions to be eligible to receive a certificate of attendance. 

A Zoom link will be emailed to registered participants in the confirmation email.

IACP is pleased to present 2023 Seminar Series: Bargaining in the Shadow of the Heart: Integrating Emotional and Intellectual Intelligence in Collaborative Practice, presented by Stephen H. Sulmeyer, J.D., Ph.D.

We all know that the disputes we are called upon to resolve have a lot to do with emotions and psychology. And yet most of us receive inadequate training on how to work with these dimensions, and even less on how to integrate the emotional and psychological dimensions with the legal and financial aspects.

This seminar focuses on these more neglected elements: how to work effectively and skillfully with emotions and psychological issues, and how to integrate that work with the legal and financial questions that our clients must resolve. Course format will be a combination of lecture, discussion, roleplays, and experiential exercises.

Learning Objectives for this Seminar are as follows:

• Listen skillfully on multiple levels to the parties in order to connect deeply with them, develop rapport, build trust, and ascertain their deepest goals, hopes and concerns.
• Inquire into and work with the parties’ non-material interests and core needs as well as their legal and financial concerns.
• Structure collaborative processes so that they are informed by the parties’ values and aspirations around how they want to negotiate, the kind of relationship they would like to have with each other going forward, and positive outcomes they want for their children.
• Integrate the parties’ material and non-material interests in terms of both process and substantive agreements.

Dates & times:  

• August 25, September 1, 8, 15, 2023: 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM PDT (check your local time here)

Pricing:

• IACP members: US$500
• Non-IACP members: US$550

Participants are expected to participate in ALL online sessions to be eligible to receive a certificate of attendance. 

A Zoom link will be emailed to registered participants in the confirmation email.