Happy New Year! We hope that our members around the world have had a joyful beginning to 2019. IACP’s board and staff kicked things off in high gear with a strategic planning retreat. This followed months of preparation: reviewing past strategic plans and notes from our 2015 Year of Listening, and conducting a member survey and focus groups with Past Presidents, Global Partners, practice group leaders, and our Leadership Link and Sustaining Links donors. The result of all this work is a plan that responds to our members’ needs and concerns with some exciting new initiatives. We are still consolidating all of this strategizing effort into a document that can be shared with members, but we wanted to report the highlights to you now. For the next two years, our top priorities are going to be Membership, Public Education, and Accessibility. A preview of what’s coming this year includes: * Supporting the stated needs of our members. We heard you loud and clear on our member survey, and we will be expanding our educational offerings, including online and advanced trainings. We’ll be adding more incentives to our Whole Group memberships, creating an online platform for practice group leaders, expanding our Introductory training faculty, and working to increase our membership so we can create more value for all. We will also be supporting the expansion of CP globally, with focus on new communities forming in Asia and South and Central America, while strengthening longstanding ties in Europe and Australia. One of the most exciting initiatives in this area will be a series of online webinars available for free or greatly reduced cost for members, starting with the Ethics webinar coming up on March 4. We plan to offer these at least monthly in the near future. * Expanding our Public Education efforts. Your survey responses also emphasized the need for greatly expanded public education efforts. So we will be adding more content to our website and improving the interface, magnifying our social media campaigns, reaching out to mainstream media, increasing our outreach to professional organizations outside the Collaborative world, and creating new multimedia tool kits for members to use in their own marketing efforts. We understand that this is an area where individual members acting alone have limited impact. By working together and using our pooled resources, we increase that impact exponentially! Be sure you follow us on social media to keep up-to-date on all we are offering. * Increasing Accessibility. “Accessibility” can mean a lot of things. We are putting a high priority on supporting Access to Collaborative programs around the world, including pro bono, low bono, and modest means programs, and on increasing equity and inclusion among our members and their clientele. We have launched a new committee to lead equity and inclusion efforts, and we will be creating tools to spread new models for Access to Collaborative, developing more culturally and geographically sensitive and translated materials, and expanding the reach of our Global Partners program. Finally, building on deliberations that have been ongoing for years, we decided it was time to update and streamline IACP’s mission statement. The new mission of IACP, which will guide all of our efforts in the coming years, is to: Transform the way families resolve conflict by building a global community of Collaborative Practice and consensual dispute resolution professionals.
As we write this, our board and committees are getting to work. It’s going to be a great year for IACP, and we’re glad to have each of you building this community along with us!
With best wishes,
Chris Farish and Anne Tamar-Mattis |
