Meet Louise & Our Team

Trail Blazer, Conflict Resolution Pioneer, Best-Selling Author and Attorney Mediator, Louise Phipps Senft has been transforming the lives of thousands experiencing conflict or unasked for dif-ficult circumstances. She founded the Baltimore Mediation Center in 1993 (now Senft and Associ-ates/Baltimore Mediation), the first mediation and training firm in the United States with a focus on relational approaches to negotiation and conflict resolution. She is the author of the best-seller Be-ing Relational: the Seven Ways to Quality Interac-tion & Lasting Change (2015). She is the producer of Blink of an Eye™ Podcast, listened to by listen-ers around the globe. Her message of hope, advo-cacy, and healing and that you are never alone in-spired the public charity BLINK of an Eye™, a/k/a I C THAT, Integrative Center for Trauma Healing, Advocacy, and Transformation, Inc. nonprofit, that exists for those who know how life can change in the blink of an eye. Their mission is to create an Extraordinary Experience for Spinal Cord Injured families despite the devastation in the first 30 days of crisis and transitions throughout the first Miracle Year. They educate about trauma and rela-tional approaches and the belief that you can heal by changing your thought patterns.

For her over 30 years as a pioneer in mediation and conflict transformation, Ms. Senft was selected by the Bar Association of Baltimore City, presidents and past presidents, in 2023 as the recipient of the Honorable Paul Dorf Award for Leadership in Alternative Dispute Resolution. In 2020, she was named as one of the Maryland Daily Record’s Leadership in Law Award honorees for her work as a state leader in mediation. She has been voted “Baltimore’s Best” Mediator by Baltimore Magazine 2002, named one of “Maryland’s Top 100 Women” for the years 2004, 2007 and 2009 by The Daily Record, inducted into Maryland’s “Circle of Excellence” for outstanding leadership in Maryland in 2009, and been honored with the highest award in her state of Maryland for her work in Alternative Dispute Resolution, namely the Chief Judge Robert M. Bell Award for Outstanding Contributions to ADR in Maryland in 2018. She was honored by the Women in Business with their 2019 Humanitar-ianism Award for her work with Safe Streets Violence Interrupters. Ms. Senft has trained 1000’s of professionals in relational ways to engage in difficult dialogues and negotiations in her nationally certified Mediation and Conflcit Transformation Skills courses, and she has brought her conflict transformation mindset and skillset and extensive Enneagram teaching as a Master Teacher to CEOs of Fortune 100 companies and non-profits across the US. She has donated a portion of her training proceeds to the Safe Streets Violence Interrupters, whom she personally trains in self-awareness and mediation skills to keep them safe in their work on the inner-city streets, and has donated thousands of hours to fam-ilies in crisis through the non profit BLINK of an Eye™.

Over the last 30 years, Ms. Senft has been selected as mediator for over 5000 family and divorce mediations and 1000’s of commercial, business, employment, board and departmental mediations.

Her firm is founded on a belief that people experiencing conflict or differences with each other have the capacity to engage in quality interactions to break through barriers when given a quality face to face dia-logue process, facilitated by a relational neutral who believes in their capacity. Senft is a prolific writer, author of a best-selling book, numerous chapters in other books including the ABA’s Be the Law-yer You Want to Be and the COVID international best-seller series: Surviving the Pandemic for Families, in addition to numerous magazine article and a law review article. She was a newspaper columnist pen-ning The Negotiation Table for over 10 years. She taught law for 25 years at the University of Mary-land School of Law and was on faculty for Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation and their Insight Initiative. She has also taught courses for Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Johns Hop-kins Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Policy and Loyola University Sellinger Business School. For over 30 years, Senft, who is referred to nationally as an “extraordinary and gifted mediator” and a “master teacher,” and her team have been sought after to facilitate difficult and sensitive interactions and to teach others across the US and abroad a relational approach to conflict transformation.

Her own family suffered tragedy in 2015 when one of her five children had a catastrophic freak diving accident rendering him a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck and chest on down. In 2019, Governor Hogan appointed Senft to the Maryland State Board of Physicians which oversees and regulates the medical profession and licensing as a result of her own advocacy for her son. Within a few years after the life altering accident, she began donating her time and skillset to assist other spinal cord injury (SCI) fam-ilies in crisis in relational ways to advocate and navigate the world of SCI during hospitalization and rehabilitation and in integrative health methods for reducing pain and promoting healing. She piloted her idea with the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation which lead to her launch of I C THAT/Blink of an Eye non profit in 2021 to serve a niche and fill an essential gap for SCI Families: advocacy, hope, essen-tial SCI information and emotional support for their first 30 days of crisis, 24/7. Blink of an Eye envi-sions they will contribute to a new medical model that is relational and more trauma-healing informed, which is good for the patient, the patient’s family and the medical staff.

Ms. Senft and her husband of 40 years, William Senft, are authors of the best-seller book, Being Relational: The Seven Ways to Quality Interaction and Lasting Change (Health Communications, Inc. 2015). The book details ways of being in relation to others that capture the heart and soul of all that is self-help which became an instant best-seller in communication and social skills. It is grounded in method, honed during her dec-ades of work as a transformative mediator, and is supported by relational conflict theory. The Seven Ways of being promote quality face to face interactions and positive transformation and are rooted in teachings from many sources—conflict transformation, negotiation ethics, neuroscience, multiple faith tradi-tions, quantum physics and numerous popular self-help and business leadership books. It is a unique collection of teachings that focuses on what happens in human interaction. It is inspired by the experience of thousands of broken or strained relationships that Ms. Senft has mediated and coached back to strength, ease and connectedness over the then last two decades of her mediation career.

Ms. Senft has achieved the Advanced Practitioner status from the Academy of Family Mediators, Associa-tion of Conflict Resolution and has an extensive background in the family environment includes domestic mediation, separation and divorce, marital property and tax liability, domestic violence, high conflict, gay and lesbian partnerships, bankruptcy, religious annulment, parental rights, grandparents’ rights, adoption, cognitive- psychological- social child development, parenting plans, religious faith and doctrine on marriage, adultery, adult grief and traumatic incident reduction, loss of child, abortion, guardianship, addiction, alco-holism, estates and trusts, real estate and personal property asset division, estate planning, end of life issues,

elder care decision-making, and closely held family business, shareholder disputes and every variety of part-nership conflict. She has been the chosen mediator for over 4000 marital, separation or divorce mediations both in the personal and in the business context and has been interviewed on the subject of divorce and family conflict by various media. She is called upon for a unique skillset that is able to synthesize large amounts of complicated and disparate points of views and to surgically unearth what it is that is most important to those who are her clients and then assist them with talking with each other. She was the selected mediator for the nationally celebrated trusts and estates case, Kloiber v Kloiber, a Dynasty trust case that challenged tax and trust laws in the US if it were to be considered marital property in Kentucky and Delaware. She was also the selected mediator by the family of the seminal marital property divorce case of Applegate v Applegate in Maryland.

Ms. Senft was elected into the honored role of Distinguished Fellow with the International Academy of Mediators and is a seasoned commercial mediator with extensive experience in the business, corporate, commercial, organizational and litigation environment, including relational and interest-based negotiation and bargaining, insurance, insurance coverage disputes, personal injury, wrongful death, Medicare and medi-cal disclosure concerns, medical malpractice, bankruptcy, business partnerships, alliance formations, succes-sion planning, workplace discrimination and ADA issues, organizational visioning, congregational conflicts and business/workplace mediation including interdepartmental issues, sexual harassment and EEO com-plaints, condominium and real estate development, construction and commercial real property management and contracting, public dialogue, regulatory disputes, public policy process, environmental policy and regula-tion, city planning, Board of Directors management, executive leadership teams, c-suite conflicts and dis-putes and systems approaches. She was selected as one of six mediators by the American Arbitration Associ-ation to mediate complex personal injury cases and was selected by the EEOC to mediate litigated employ-ment discrimination cases for the Mid-Atlantic Region for a decade throughout the 1990’s. In addition to mediating many hundreds of business, workplace, EEO and litigated disputes, she is called upon regu-larly to facilitate quality conversations over difficult issues and meaningful dialogue when there is complexity involving executives, managers and boards of directors, with outcomes of more fully in-formed decision-making and more qualitative working relations.

Ms. Senft has been selected as an ACET, the highest status awarded to a national trainer by the Association of Conflict Resolution, the largest Alternative Dispute Resolution association in the US and Canada, designating her as teacher to teach others for certification on any subject in Conflict Resolution.

Over 25 years ago, Ms. Senft pioneered into mediation and negotiation training, both in the law and business school classroom as well as her public trainings, the introduction of the study of self-aware-ness and method for reducing one’s own personal reactivity. She is a certified Enneagram teacher in the Narrative Tradition and associated with the Trifold School for Enneagram Studies and the International As-sociation of Enneagram Teachers in the Narrative Tradition. The Enneagram is an ancient and modern sys-tem for understanding personality and what motivates human beings. She has incorporated the Enneagram wisdom for all her trainings and she offers Enneagram workshops on emotional intelligence and self-aware-ness for thousands of professionals and students: advocates, judges, lawyers, businesses executives, manag-ers, mental health practitioners, medical personnel, parents and families. An area of focus that has brought Ms. Senft great joy over the years is introducing the Enneagram and the relational transformative approach to conflict to clients to assist them with having healthier and more satisfying interactions long after they have used the services of Baltimore Mediation. She has pioneered reliance on self-awareness and the Enne-agram for the conflict resolution and mediation communities as a means of quality and ethical practice and personal and professional excellence. She has championed self awareness as a way of Being Cen-tered and Grounded for Relational Leadership.

Working with people who desire to work out complicated or difficult situations but are not sure how, as well as consulting for those who know how but there is resistance or other complications, Ms. Senft and her team have pioneered the Be Relational ™ approach. The approach focuses on the interaction itself, transforming the barriers into effective exchanges of meaningful dialogue and information. This creates break-throughs. The outcomes of their approach are shifts, new clarity, greater connectedness of the stakeholders and practical and sustainable agreements.

Senft and her firm specialize in working with Family Offices, Business Executives, Medical Administrators and Healthcare Personnel. Baltimore Mediation offers strategy and facilitation for organizations and de-partments in transition or rebuilding using the Be Relational ™ approach. The firm has worked with facilitating executives and their leadership teams of Fortune 100 and 500 companies, physicians and staff in hospitals and health systems, including Johns Hopkins Medical Institution and the integration of various med-ical departments, including Johns Hopkins Hospital, Bayview Hospital and departments at Sibley Hospital.

Senft mediated the nationally acclaimed Harbor Point development, now known as Harbor East, in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor shoreline, which was at one time contaminated land from an oil spill, lying fallow and then reclaimed for development. She was the selected mediator to facilitate contentious public meetings and to mediate with stakeholders including local and state environmentalists, historical preservationists, state regulators, contractors, developers, architects and civil engineers, city regulators, international building and landscape designers, departments of tourism and transportation, and impacted unhappy local residents and businesses. The area today is one of Baltimore’s crown jewel development and revitalization projects, with approximately three miles of walking paths from Fells Point around the Inner Harbor and with the con-struction of LEEDS office buildings that wrap residential spaces with green roofs and a new automobile bridge to alleviate traffic congestion.

Senft was also asked by the highest court of Kentucky to mediate the nationally celebrated case of Kloiber vs Kloiber, a litigated matter in three courts over one of the purportedly largest dynasty trusts in the United States. Forbes Magazine extensively covered the matter at stake of whether or not a marital claim could pierce the corporate veil for dynasty trusts with related tax consequences. The resolution preserved the ability to shelter wealth with wide ramifications for gifting and charitable distributions.

Born in Charleston South Carolina and raised in Springfield, Illinois, Ms. Senft has lived in Baltimore since graduating from law school. Ms. Senft has been dedicated to her city and to Baltimore city residents teaching ways to engage that deescalate and transform conflict. She worked for many years with a wide variety of African American churches in Baltimore and the Safe Streets Network which she co-founded to protect children in the inner city of Baltimore before and after school. In more recent years, she has worked with Safe Streets Violence Interrupters, former prison inmates now devoted to preserving life on the streets in their former inner-city neighborhoods. In the 1990s, one neighborhood in Baltimore called Senft while she was away teaching in upstate New York to return to facilitate an angry group of about 200 Baltimoreans regarding a widely publicized contentious land development proposal.

Her cutting edge work of being able to facilitate not only difficult dialogue, often face to face, but heated and often divisive issues for large groups of people has had her called upon to consult, design and facilitate other public projects around the US and the world working with different cultures. She has worked with dangerously divided political parties in Athens, Greece over issues of immigration, and she has worked with Clan Elders on the Hopi Indian Reservation over issues of cultural preservation and moder-nity for an Indian tribe with customs of matrilineal property succession and the eschewing of running water and electricity.

She is a frequent keynote speaker for women and young professionals in Relational Leadership and for corporate, health, medical and lawyer audiences. She loves to tell stories and to inspire. Her messages often stir the soul on ways to choose Being Relational in a highly transactional world. Ways to create well-being in negotiations and policy making leaves audiences riveted. She has provided keynote speeches through-out the US and Canada. When Ms. Senft was asked to speak at the United Nations in 2008 to inspire young leaders worldwide, she championed an elicitive and relational approach to cultural and economic differences. She urged the delegates to be mediators, what she calls “little m” mediators, assisting as “Communication Brokers”, striving to work “Beyond Win-win” experiences, phrases she coined, because there is much more to agreement making than the transaction. What we need in the world are leaders who can engage rela-tionally to negotiate agreement-making with terms that create well-being for everyone. For her medical au-diences, her message is for “Relational Medicine”, ways to revolutionize the quality of the interaction and that relationship to healing.

Starting with a “Mt. Everest of an idea”, as noted by one Congressman in 2010, Ms. Senft was part of the founding group of Trustees of the Board of Trustees for Convergence: Center for Public Policy Reso-lution, a Washington, DC non-profit dedicated to moving large impact projects forward. The idea was to take an approach to dialogue used for localized issues and scale it to issues of national importance for Americans. Ms. Senft helped shape the relational aspect of the dialogue and process used now as part of the Convergence Way. Convergence was created with a focus on bipartisan dialogue on pressing US political issues of the day, including US-Muslim relations, Re-imagining K-12 Education, Health and Wellness Project on Obesity and Diabetes, Balancing the Budget and the Prison Crisis. Ms. Senft cham-pioned fund raising for quality dialogue amongst national stakeholders as the Chair of Fund Development. In five years, Convergence grew from a small group of unpaid volunteers and a zero budget to an annual operat-ing budget of $4M. All funding was devoted to quality process of dialogue and quality decision making.

In 2009 and 2014, her firm, Baltimore Mediation, was recognized as a “Top 100 MBE” minority owned enterprise in the Mid-Atlantic region. In 2007, Ms. Senft, also an attorney, was honored with one of the Baltimore Business Journal’s “Most Enterprising Woman” awards, and in 2010, Ms. Senft was inducted into the Greater Baltimore Area’s YWCA’s Academy of Leaders with a “Special Leader of the Year” award for her work in the field of conflict resolution with outcomes to help eradicate racism. She has also received a “Hero Award” from the American Red Cross for her work establishing the Safe Haven Net-work for children in Baltimore and for her transformative approach to conflict that betters the lives of fami-lies. Ms. Senft, a member of Leadership Maryland’s Class of 2009, was also honored by Smart CEO Maga-zine with a Brava Award as a top CEO in Maryland in 2012. That same year she was invited into the Women Presidents Organization, Inc. for female founders of multi-million dollar companies.

Baltimore Mediation offers nationally recognized negotiation and conflict resolution training, all from the transformative relational framework. Ms. Senft is known nationally and internationally for her elicitive design and delivery of Transformative Mediation trainings and Relational Negotiation and Conflict Transformation trainings, all rooted in relational conflict theory. She and her firm were chosen by the R. B. Bush and J. Folger team to pilot training for teaching transformative conflict theory and Bush and Folger’s state of the art terms of Empowerment and Recognition with practical application in the early 1990’s. Ms. Senft added the critical importance of developing self-awareness to conflict triggers, and was the first mediator and trainer to bring the importance of self-awareness and central nervous system regulation methods to the ADR field. A hallmark of her trainings is self-awareness, maintaining a strong grounded self open and responsive to others with ways to approach difficult negotiations and conflicted situations which

invite and foster, and never manipulate or force, changes in the interaction dynamics. Baltimore Mediation has designed interventions and customized trainings for 1000’s of professionals, executives, court sys-tems, bar associations, government agencies, small and large companies both local and national, state and federal contractors, real estate and construction management firms, physicians and medical staff, long term care and assisted living facilities management, higher education faculty, religious and clergy as well as men-tal health and family law practitioners. She and her team have also custom designed hundreds of work-shops for retreats and conferences.

A hallmark of Ms. Senft’s teaching approach is to focus on the gifts of each negotiator’s and media-tor’s essence of who they are, with developed self-observation, which can then reveal the blindspots for greater self-awareness, which allows the practitioner the greater likelihood of being able to shift focus to oth-ers’ emotional defense mechanisms and related somatic experiences. She carries a deep belief, supported more recently by neuroscience, that when a person learns and practices method of how to relax the three centers of intelligence, head, heart and body, he or she has a greater chance in the moment of be-ing more open and authentic to others as they are to themselves, and in response to conflict as it un-folds.

Ms. Senft, as the early adopter of the value of self-awareness in training and practices for conflict interven-ers, has also brought those concepts to the academic classroom in her over 25 years of teaching courses at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, the Insight Initiative, the University of Maryland School of Law for 20 years, the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School, the Johns Hopkins University MBA Bio-technology Program, the Johns Hopkins University Business of Medicine Pro-gram, Loyola University Sellinger Business School and Villa Julie College, now Stevenson University, where she began her teaching career. In 2009, the Administrative Office of the Courts of Maryland asked Ms. Senft to design an assessment program for court-rostered domestic mediators modeled on her Practi-tioner’s Institute, a formative and summative assessment based on actual real-time observed performance of the mediator. She has expanded this program for other mediators nationwide and for state bar associations.

She is a prolific writer having had a monthly blog for the American Bar Association, I Can Relate, and was a monthly columnist for The Daily Record, The Negotiating Table: Turning Problems into Opportunities for over 10 years. She has authored numerous mediation skills manuals, chapters in books, articles in law re-view journals, trade journals, magazines and has been called upon for comment as a thought leader in many news outlets. She is the author of the final chapter, Risky Business: Being Relational in a Transac-tional World in the book, Be the Best Lawyer You Can Be, ed. S. Levine, American Bar Association (2018). She is co-author of the final chapter of the ADR Handbook for Judges, ed. D. Stienstra & S. Yates, Ameri-can Bar Association and Federal Judicial Center (2004), has her work facilitating public policy conflicts fea-tured in Chapter 3 “Gaining Sight of the Goal of Transformation,” of the revised Promise of Mediation, 2d. ed., B. Bush & J. Folger, Jossey-Bass (2004) and is co-author of the chapter “Marital Mediation: Transform-ing Marital Conflict through Facilitated Dialogue—Reclaiming Personal Strength and Marital Connected-ness”, with N. Good in Transformative Mediation: A Sourcebook, Resources for Conflict Intervention Practi-tioners and Programs, ed. J. Folger, B. Bush, and D. Della Noce, ISCT and Asso. Conflict Resolution Pub-lishers (2010). Her book Being Relational: The Seven Ways to Quality Interaction and Lasting Change, co-authored with her husband, Bill Senft, published by HCI Publishers in 2015. Ms. Senft is working on a Being Relational series with working titles: for Parents; How to Transform Conflict Interaction with your Teen-ager; for Managers: How to Transform Conflict Interaction with your Staff and Co-Workers; for Doctors: How to Engage with Staff and Patients to Transform Conflict and Create Well-being; for Families in Medi-cal Crisis: How to Engage and Transform Interactions with Doctors to Get What you Need for Your Loved

One: Expert Care and Healing. She has a contract to write a book on the Enneagram of Personality and Con-flit, and Indie Books will publish her Trauma Healing Learnings in 2023.

She has been interviewed by NPR and has been a guest on NPR radio affiliates and other radio programs. She has been on ABC TV with Charles Gibson for her work in difficult elder care issues. Ms. Senft’s work with family businesses is featured in the documentary, Resolutionary People (2002), produced by Emmy award winner Richard Chisolm. Ms. Senft’s work with corporate and public policy multiparty fa-cilitation is featured in the book the Promise of Mediation (Jossey-Bass, 2004). Ms. Senft’s work in elder care mediation was the featured story on ABC World news with Charles Gibson in July 27, 2007. Her rela-tional work with medical staff and physicians in her personal life when one of her sons was catastrophically injured in 2015 and became a quadriplegic complete is highlighted in the blog, Archer Senft Updates (2015-2017) and is the basis of the podcast story, Blink of an Eye™, with listeners around the globe.

In the international arena, Ms. Senft is one of the founding members of Mediators Beyond Borders™, a non-profit offering conflict resolution aid and training for initiatives such as the Child Soldier Project in Ghana, the Greek Immigration Dialogue initiative in Athens and the Katrina Mediation Project in New Orle-ans and Biloxi, Mississippi. She served as Executive Chair of Training for MBB domestically and inter-nationally for the first four year of launch and speaks internationally on behalf of the MBB mission of dia-logue.

Ms. Senft was the first mediation trainer nationally to be approved as an Accredited Continuing Edu-cation Trainer (ACET) by the Association for Conflict Resolution in 2010, providing her the distinction of approval for teaching as an exceptional life-long teacher. Ms. Senft was one of the first elected Associ-ates of the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation. She is a nationally Certified Transform-ative Mediator™ and has also been certified by the Maryland Council on Dispute Resolution, the only two performance-based certifications of skill level in the US. She is the architect for Maryland’s Perfor-mance Based Assessment for Transformative Mediators—The Practitioner’s Institute—which served as an assessment model for a program for Maryland Family Court Appointed Family Mediators that launched in 2009, part of the statewide Maryland Program for Mediator Excellence, the first in the country. Ms. Senft is also the co-architect of the state of Maryland’s Mediation Ombuds Program, designed to handle con-sumer mediation complaints throughout Maryland with a restorative approach. Ms. Senft has earned the sta-tus of Advanced Practitioner in the Family Section’s Academy of Family Mediators as a member of the international Association of Conflict Resolution’s (ACR), formerly the Academy of Family Mediators.

In her field of conflict resolution and conflict transformation, throughout the 1990’s to the present, she has served continuously in various leadership capacities for the Association for Conflict Resolution, on its Ethics Committee, Mediation News staff, Training Approval Committee and Family Section Advisory Council, where she served as Co-Chair. She also served as Co-Chair of the Baltimore City Bar Associa-tion’s first ADR Committee in the early 1990’s, and she was elected as a Council Member to serve on the Maryland State Bar Association’s ADR Section Council in its early years of formation. In 1998, she was ap-pointed by Chief Judge Bell to the Maryland Court of Appeals’ ADR Commission and the task force on Pro-fessional Responsibility in ADR. In 2000, Ms. Senft was appointed by the highest court to Chair the first statewide Family ADR Initiative. She was the co-architect of the state’s mediator grievance process, The MPME Ombudsman Program, and was subsequently appointed as Chair in 2003 of the Mediator Ombuds-man Program for the Maryland Mediation and Conflict Resolution Office. During that time she also served in 2002 as President of the Maryland Council for Dispute Resolution with a focus on creating a strong internal infrastructure for the future and representing the views of the private practitioner on MACRO initiatives. She is a founding member of Mediators Beyond Borders™, whose mission is to build sustainable conflict

resolution capacity for a more peaceable world, where she served as Director of Training from 2007-2010 establishing protocols and quality control and the template for the current MBB training program. From 2011-2015 she served as a Trustee on the Board for Convergence: Center for Policy Resolution in Wash-ington, DC, where she served as a Chair of Fund Development. She was asked to serve as a Governor on the Board of the International Academy of Mediators in 2019, to assist in their mission of quality mediation for commercial disputes.

Ms. Senft has served as a Member of the corporate advisory board for the national Saval Food Service and Deli Brand companies from 2009-2015. Outside of the field of ADR, Ms. Senft has served non-profit organizations whose mission she champions in such roles as Treasurer and on the Executive Board of Net-work 2000 whose mission is to place women on corporate boards and to mentor rising female executives; an elected board member for the Coalition of Geriatric Services in Maryland, whose mission is to expand compassionate alternative services to seniors at home and in residential living; as Vice President of the Ro-land Park Civic League (2007-2013), whose focus is on civic engagement, the preservation of historic green space in Baltimore City, preservation of an historic water tower in Baltimore City, monitoring other land developments for compatibility with preservation goals, and the creation of a 100 year Master Plan for the preservation and modernization of the historic garden community designed by the Olmsted Brothers. She was also a founding member of the Tuesday Girls whose mission was to provide networking opportunities for women executives and business owners; was a partner in Accelerent, a national platform for mid-sized corporate businesses in the Mid-Atlantic; served as a corporate mentor for the COMMIT Foundation, whose mission is to mentor mid-level female veterans to reach their full potential personally and professionally; and served for nine years on the board of the Girl Scouts of Central Maryland (1989-1998) with a focus on their capital campaign to expand services for inner-city girls.

She has also served Board positions in her children’s schools and her church, including being the first woman President of the Parish Council for the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, the seat of the Baltimore Archdiocese; a member of the Board of Directors of Grace Methodist Church Pre-School; an officer of the Cathedral School’s CASPA, the Parent’s Association for her Children’s grade school; a member of the Gil-man School Parents’ Association, the Bryn Mawr School Health and Wellness Committee, and the McDonogh School Parents’ Association. She also was selected to serve from (2004-2010) on the National Catholic Review Board of Washington, DC/Arlington Diocese regarding the pedophilia sex scandals and the oversight of the sentences of those found guilty and the potential restorative measures offered to the fami-lies of victims.

Ms. Senft served two terms on the Catholic Community Foundation, where she was Chair of Distribu-tions and oversight of a Catholic community fund of Four Million Dollars for donor designated services. She also donates her time as a Dame in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and travels with a group of “malades”, those who are sick and dying, and a medical team to Lourdes, France, a pilgrimage of sometimes physical and always spiritual healing.

Other highlights of Ms. Senft’s broad career include her selection in what was called by the United States Postal Service the “dream team” of mediators and trainers, back when the gasly expression “going Postal” was headline news across the US. She was part of the first national certified mediation training team for the United States Postal Service REDRESS Program for EEO/discrimination complaints and other work-place disputes born from a Florida judge’s ruling that the Postal Service had to put in place radical culture change. From 1998 through 2001, Ms. Senft trained mediators in transformative mediation across the coun-try as part of the USPS national rollout, which trained over 2500 outside neutrals from 32 states, as well as over 18,000 labor and management representatives.

Ms. Senft was the initiator of, Co-Creator, Lead Trainer and Supervisor for the Baltimore City Circuit Court’s first Family Mediation Services program from 1998-2005, which focused on providing trans-formative mediation services for the resolution of custody and visitation lawsuits, and which continues to serve thousands of Baltimore families in the court system annually to this day.

Ms. Senft was the co-founder of The Safe Haven Network with Pastor Marshall Prentice: a church, po-lice, school, and community safety initiative for children in Baltimore City which has provided safe shelters before and after school for children and conflict intervention training and safety skills to church, community residents and school officials since from 1993 to 2013. The Safe Haven Network knit together Black churches along the west side of Baltimore and the east side of Baltimore of all denominations, working on a common mission, a first for them to work together– Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic, Muslim Mosque, Unitarian, Methodist, street evangelist and a number of houses of worship associated with a vibrant pastor, all sited in the inner city of Baltimore with volunteers visible and present every school morning and after-noon, deterring crime as the eyes and ears of the community and providing shelter for children walking to and from school.

Ms. Senft served on Governor’s Commissions and a Task Force, most notably for Governor Glendening’s Transition Team, the Commission on Public Safety and Correction, and the Task Force on Youth Citi-zenship and Violence Prevention, and she served as Chair of the Governor’s Task Force on Youth Citizen-ship and Violence Prevention’s Out-of-Schools Activities Committee from 1995-1996. She later provided technical assistance in programming, violence reduction education and evaluation for the Governor’s office on Crime Control and Prevention’s state and federally funded initiative for community after school pro-grams for late elementary and middle school youth throughout Maryland from 1996-1999. Ms. Senft also served the state when she was appointed to Chief Judge Robert Bell’s Commission on Alternative Dispute Resolution where she served in numerous capacities on committees as this Commission recognized the value of ADR and designed its rollout across the state for Families, Civil and Criminal Courts, Businesses, Neigh-borhoods, and Schools.

Ms. Senft has served on numerous Bar Association committees, including a committee that brought the first “Settlement Days” to the court system in the late 1980’s and including presidential appointments to the Special Committee which drafted the Guidelines for the Prevention of Sexual Harassment adopted by the Maryland State Bar for law firms throughout the State. She was also the Chair of the 1994 publication “Baltimore’s Children and Their Families.” Listed in the Worldwide Who’s Who and the International Who’s Who, she was also sought out by television’s Arts and Entertainment on recommendation of New York City mediator colleagues to help script the TV pilot, The Mediator.

Ms. Senft and her husband, William Senft, also founded the nonprofit, ORANS™: The Campaign for Relational Leadership. It was created for the purpose of driving a relational message in media on why and how to be both self and other orientated in interactions, especially those that are difficult, conflicted or with an enemy and how to be self and other oriented when policy making. The mission of the organization turned to focus on water when William Senft drafted a plan to use a non-profit model to take the greed factor out of water systems in the US and use a relational approach for farming municipalities to cooperate with each other for governance over water they could control. He renamed the non-profit, the EJ Water Trust, and then the NonProfit Water, where work continues to change business models and policy, municipal projects, pri-vate-public partnerships, financing, collaborations, innovation, distribution, climate change, and messaging on issues of one of the most pressing issues around the globe: water. ORANS™ remains a relational pub-lishing house.

Prior to embarking on her career as a mediator and founding Baltimore Mediation, Ms. Senft was a litigator and a defense trial lawyer engaged in practice at the Baltimore law firm, Whiteford, Taylor and Preston in the areas of insurance, commercial defense and family law.

She hails from Springfield, Illinois, was inducted into her highschool’s Sacred Heart-Griffin High School Hall of Fame in 2010, attended the University of Virginia, where she was President of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and served on the Class of 1983 Class Reunion Committee for every reunion. She attended Washington & Lee School of Law, where she was named Most Outstanding Woman Law Student, resur-rected and founded the new Women Law Students Organization and was the first female elected as an Executive Committee representative of the then over 235 year honor system since its founding in 1749. Washington & Lee’s honor system is single sanction for both the undergraduate and graduate students. Ms. Senft believed her primary role was to advocate strenuously for due process in a system run by stu-dents lacking checks and balances.

She has been happily married to Bill Senft since 1984 and is the mother of five wonderful children, one of whom, Archer, tragically was rendered a quadriplegic complete as a result of a freak diving acci-dent in 2015. Ms. Senft spent months living by his hospital bedside in ICU’s across the country as he was on life support and she was devoted to advocating for what was possible, notably alternative ways to keep him alive and ways to wean him off of life support using homeopathic and other remedies. Archer remains para-lyzed from the shoulders down but their family’s experience is the motivation for the public charity she launched in 2020, Blink of an Eye™. The Senft family counts their blessings every day that Archer is alive and that they all celebrate each other’s lives, knowing life is both up and down. Ms. Senft believes they are stronger and more grounded as a result of living through tragedy with support and faith.

Ms. Senft can be reached at Louise@BaltimoreMediation.com.

You may also schedule a consult with her team at https://calendly.com/baltimoremediation/30minfreeinitialcall?back=1&month=2022-03

Beverly Hovmand has fourteen years of experience as a mediator with a focus on workplace, family, and eldercare mediation, the last twelve as an associate member of Baltimore Mediation. She also acts as a co-trainer with Louise Phipps Senft for Baltimore Mediation’s annual trainings including: Basic Mediation Skills, Mediation for Custody and Parenting Plans and Mediation for Workplace Issues.For the past twelve years Ms. Hovmand has been a mediator for the Baltimore City Circuit Court. Beverly helped design and is a trainer for SHAPE (Shared Parenting Experience), an educational parenting program provided by the Baltimore City Circuit Court for unmarried parents. Beverly is a volunteer mediator for the Commission on Civil Rights, Baltimore, Maryland.Prior to her training as a mediator, Beverly worked for fifteen years as a facilitator, trainer, and consultant within the Employee Assistance field conducting trainings for managers and supervisors on managing conflict in organizational settings. She had a private psychotherapy practice for ten years working with individuals and families to resolve conflict in their relationships and effectively manage life transitions and family change.Beverly completed her undergraduate work at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, graduate work at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, Baltimore, Maryland and is a licensed clinical social worker. She is also trained in online dispute resolution (ODR).

Ms. Hovmand is a responder with the Workplace Trauma Center, a national provider of crisis management for business industry and government, having conducted over one hundred fifty interventions including support services at Dulles Airport following the events of September 11, 2001.Beverly is a member of the Maryland Program for Mediator Excellence and the Association for Conflict Resolution.

Sharon focuses on providing mediation services relevant to the challenges of human resource management and was employed by the State of Maryland in the area of human resources for over 36 years — in both the Executive and Judicial branches.She says, “As a senior executive human resources professional, I (along with my team) was frequently the first responder to workplace conflicts. It has been my professional philosophy that because interrelationships between individuals and work units within the workplace often remain after a conflict has been addressed, it is critical to the good health of the larger organization that damages to these relationships be minimized and, ideally, enhanced. Given this perspective, I would attempt to facilitate discussions between individuals and/or work units as well as coach the respective administrator, director, manager, supervisor, etc. in order to resolve a conflict at the lowest possible level.In the human resources sub-discipline of employer-employee relations, matters involving disputes are generally handled through a formal grievance or disciplinary appeal process that results in a decision imposed on the parties by an arbiter. By contrast and in hindsight, I now realize that my approach to conflict resolution mirrored the transformative mediation model. It is a highly valuable and effective alternative to the formal fact-finding method because of its reliance on getting to the underlying nature of a conflict and it provides several sustainable benefits, including the empowerment of the respective parties, enhanced understanding of the other side, clarity by all parties about the underlying causes of the disagreement and the opportunity for disputants to solve their conflict.”

Dusty joined Baltimore Mediation in 2009, after many years in which Baltimore Mediation provided training for 32 community centers which he helped found, namely the Community Mediation Centers of Calvert and St. Mary’s County, Maryland. He is past president of the Board of Directors of the Community Mediation Center of St. Mary’s County. He has mediation experience with hundreds of cases involving family, community, District and Circuit Court, discrimination and foster care cases. He is a member of the Maryland Program for Mediator Excellence and the Association for Conflict Resolution. Dusty has trained with leaders in the field of transformative mediation, including Baruch Bush, Joe Folger, Louise Phipps Senft, Nancy Good, Tom Wahlrab and Irv Foster. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School and the Defense Systems Management College, Program Manager’s Course. He is an Associate Fellow of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots.

I am an associate on the Baltimore Mediation team, trained and certified in general mediation and family and domestic mediation. By background, I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker practicing in the field of mental health for over 30 years, having graduated from SUNY Stony Brook, School of Social Work, in 1990. I have advanced training in family therapy and, as a certified mediator using a transformative framework, my approach, like all of us on the Baltimore Mediation team, is to focus on quality dialogue and communication breakthroughs. I have been an adjunct Professor at McDaniel College’s Masters in Counseling program, and worked for 10 years in Child Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where I was a 4-year long member of the hospital-wide ethics committee.

My psychotherapy practice focus includes adolescent, couples and family therapy. I have advanced training in Family Therapy, CBT for anxiety/depression/suicidality, Trauma-Focused CBT, and treat mood/anxiety and substance abuse disorders and couples in high conflict.

My mediation practice focus is family and domestic mediation. I see all my work as collaborative, working together towards goals identified by clients. In a neutral and non-judgmental atmosphere, people build upon their strengths while focusing on practical solutions to problems.

I fundamentally believe in preserving relationships and people inherently having capacity for change. This drives how I help people connect with their strengths, understand how they impact others, how others impact them, and how they navigate their larger worlds. As this process unfolds, people see ways to support themselves and live easier, happier lives.

Barry Evans has 25 years of experience as a mediator, beginning his affiliation with Baltimore Mediation when Louise partnered with The Sheppard Pratt Health System and the Baltimore City Circuit Court to create the first family mediation program of its kind in the state. Barry created, with another Baltimore Mediation Team Mediator, Beverly Hovmand, the first pre-mediation orientation for never married parents in the country, called SHAPE. SHAPE was emulated by many court systems across the US.

Barry is also an award-winning Toastmaster, professional speaker, and trainer with 25 years plus of working in higher education. Of the many positions he held at Towson University, he loved his role as the Director of the Office of Diversity Resources. He was an often-requested presenter for the Towson University Office of Leadership & Organizational Development. He has been part of Baltimore Mediation’s DEI work and it’s work on race relations for many years.

He is an alternative dispute resolution practitioner specializing in the mediation of divorce cases and parent education for parents in the court system attempting to establish custody of their children. No matter the audience he presents to, his goal is to have people acquire a greater understanding of the importance of how they now affect their future.

His most challenging audience of late is presenting to court-ordered divorcing parents. His goal is to help these men and women who are often at the mercy of incredible emotional conflict, to develop a greater understanding of the options and choices they have in the ways they choose to engage or not which can minimize the negative ramifications of certain choices on their children and themselves.

Ultimately, Barry wants to empower people to stand in the heat of the furnace without getting burned. It’s why he is devoted to the relational model of mediation which informs all of the Baltimore Mediation team.

Bill Senft, CPA and attorney, specializes in the mediation of business contract, partnership and workplace disputes including those giving rise to EEO complaints. He has served private, governmental and non-profit employers providing a neutral and confidential process for working through the difficult conflicts that arise in workplace relationships. Bill also provides mediation for corporations, partnerships, foundations and family businesses including financial planning, management and corporate control issues, business succession planning and other disputes in the family and business context – always practicing within the relational approach to mediation.For more than 20 years Bill has served as a finance consultant and legal advisor to entrepreneurs – with clients in many industries and the non-profit sector. Bill has vast experience in corporate transactions, fundraising, tax and finance planning for families and family business, debt workouts and numerous other legal and financial matters.Bill has served as Adjunct Faculty at the Johns Hopkins University Carey School of Business and at Loyola University of Maryland Sellinger School of Business teaching courses in Negotiation and Negotiation Ethics. He is a graduate of the McIntire School of Business at the University of Virginia and began his career as an accountant with Price Waterhouse before attending law school at Washington and Lee University. He practiced bankruptcy and financial workout law at law firms in Baltimore and Washington DC.

Bill serves the community through involvement in community, educational and religious organizations. You can reach him at bill@baltimoremediation.com.

Judge Ronald A. Karasic (Ret.) joined Baltimore Mediation in 2013 following his retirement from the District Court of Maryland for Baltimore City. Throughout his law career, Judge Karasic used mediation as a practical forum for resolving conflict. He has extensive experience in workplace conflict including EEO, discrimination and employment claims, personnel matters related to discipline, hiring and promotions, and labor negotiations.Judge Karasic handled civil and criminal matters for nearly twelve years on the bench, where he presided over thousands of contract and tort cases. Such matters included auto repair and towing disputes, insurance claims involving tort and contract matters, debt collection cases, civil and criminal domestic violence cases, neighborhood land disputes, and property disputes between neighbors. During his tenure, he was specially assigned to Drug Treatment Court, Housing Court and Rent Court. While presiding in Rent Court, throughout his 12 year tenure, Judge Karasic developed expertise in landlord-tenant law and matters related to residential and commercial leases including rent escrow, housing code enforcement, lead paint regulations,, subleases and renewals, and condominium law. As a recalled judge, he has presided over the Pre-Trial Settlement docket in Baltimore County.Prior to becoming a judge, Judge Karasic was the Deputy Public Defender for the State of Maryland for eleven years. Included in his duties were the mediation of agency employment matters, EEO compliance, defense of discrimination and employment claims, personnel matters related to progressive discipline, hiring and promotions.

Judge Karasic also served as a Chief City Solicitor in the Baltimore City Law Department. There, he supervised attorneys responsible for a wide variety of cases for the Baltimore City Department of Public Works dealing with land-use issues, employment matters, tort litigation and environmental matters.

Judge Karasic also represented City agencies in various employment matters involving labor negotiations, employee terminations, and discrimination claims based upon age, gender, religion and race. He was Chief Counsel to the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners and the Superintendent of Schools.

From 1981-1990, Judge Karasic was in private practice where he concentrated on small business matters, personal injury litigation, employment disputes, and contract disputes. From 1998-2010, Judge Karasic taught courses in Legal Analysis, Research and Writing and Introduction to Advocacy at University of Baltimore School of Law.

Judge Karasic, a graduate of the University of Delaware and the University of Baltimore School of Law, is a former member of the Attorney Grievance Commission, the State of Maryland Alternative Dispute Resolution Commission, the State of Maryland Critical Areas Commission, the Governor’s Commission on Alcohol and Drugs, and the District Court Commissioners Education Committee.

Vicki joined Baltimore Mediation in 2009, after years of working together with her husband, Dusty Rhoades, founding and providing mediation and facilitation services for community mediation centers in Calvert and St. Mary’s Counties. Vicki and Dusty have been partners in life for over 40 years and co-mediators in the transformative framework since 2001. Vicki specializes in mediation cases around family and community issues, She is a member of the Maryland Program for Mediator Excellence and the Association for Conflict Resolution. Together with Dusty, she offers professional mediation training and coaching services.

Andrew Fontanella is a mediator and attorney who practices in the Greater Baltimore and Washington DC Metropolitan area. His practice focuses on family law and consumer bankruptcy. Since 2009, Andrew has enhanced his practice by offering a range of alternative dispute resolution options to clients to deal with their conflict. In addition to mediation, Andrew is trained in conflict-coaching, and collaborative practice. In conflict-coaching a party can come to a robust understanding of the nature of a conflict when the other party does not engage or cooperate. Collaborative practice is a team approach to conflict, where parties prefer to avoid litigation and instead, create a durable agreement that focuses on their common goals and interest.In addition to Baltimore Mediation, Andrew is a contract mediator with the Circuit Court for Baltimore City in their Family Law Division, a roster mediator with Baltimore CountyCivil Division, a roster mediator for the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Maryland, the District Court of Maryland, and the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights.

Andrew is dedicated to and has a gift for intercultural communication. He is highly proficient in both Spanish and American Sign Language. He is a continuing student in the interpreter training program for American Sign Language at Baltimore County Community College. Many of his clients speak Spanish and sign American Sign Language (ASL).

Since 2009, Andrew has trained with Baltimore Mediation to become a skilled and intuitive mediator from the transformative framework. He is committed to fostering dialogue over everyday legal issues that arise in his practice and brings that experience to his mediation practice.

Andrew lives with his partner of 15 years near the cultural arts section of Baltimore City. In addition to taking care of his family, which includes 2 beautiful dogs, Andrew is part of a community group that maintains Fitzgerald Park, in the historic Bolton Hill neighborhood. He continues to participate in making Baltimore city a great place to live.

Mediation Consultant for Organizations and Churches

Conflict Transformation Assistant Professor, Conflict Transformation Masters Degree Program, Eastern Mennonite University

Senior Mediator & Trainer, Community Mediation Center, Harrisonburg, Virginia

Partner, Newman Avenue Associates Family Therapists

Former Director, National Coalition Building Institute for prejudice reduction, Virginia Chapter

Monica Koski is a dispute resolution professional with over 20 years experience with public and private litigation as a court reporter. She is a seasoned mediator having mediated hundreds of court referred and private matters over the last seven years. Monica has joined Baltimore Mediation with a commitment to educating people in the workplace on the relational approach to conflict transformation and the mediation process, and to providing third party neutral services, conflict resolution skills training, and consulting.Prior to her mediation career, Monica was entrenched in the litigation arena for 13 years in the State of Maryland, in DC, and Virginia, has seen thousands of people in conflict and has witnessed first-hand the effects of parties involved in a rigid, fact-finding process that alienated the concept and importance of relating and relationship with one human being to another.Ms. Koski was trained as a mediator through Baltimore Mediation, The Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Community Mediation Maryland. She has experience handling complex situations ranging from 2-10 parties.She has mediated cases involving issues on elder care, parent-teen, neighbors, local churches, the State’s Attorneys Office, multiple school districts, HOAs and local private companies.Monica has committed herself to the field of conflict transformation with a dedication to relieve crises in human interaction and an intention to empower people to live authentically while working through their differences.

Ms. Koski is a member of the Maryland Program for Mediator Excellence, Association for Conflict Resolution Workplace Division and is also trained through the International Ombuds Association. She is also an elected member of the Board of Community Mediation Maryland, and chairs their Development Committee. Her depth of commitment to her mediation practice is shown in her ability to follow parties through their difficult dialogue and conflict interactions, and to facilitate meaningful conversations that result in overall party satisfaction.

Ms. Koski’s training includes employee engagement work, teambuilding, dealing with difficult people, and handling high emotions. She is also a grant writer collaborating with Baltimore Mediation clients including various federal agencies such as USDA and FSIS.Ms. Koski can be reached at monica@baltimoremediation.com.

Nan has been working with Baltimore Mediation and Louise Phipps Senft, Esq. for over 15 years, as an international co-trainer, co-presenter, coach, and mediator.Nan is a dynamic facilitator, author, transformative high conflict mediator, psychotherapist, conflict systems design consultant, executive conflict coach, educator and a founding partner in Dispute Resolution Professionals, LLC, established in 1997 in the Denver metropolitan area.An expert in high conflict family systems and multiparty complex workplace disputes; she was trained as a mediator at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation in 1995, as well as USPS Redress training in 1998. She received specialized Divorce and Child Custody training at CDR in Boulder, CO. She has mediated over 2800 cases and was a grievance mediator for United Airlines for 25 years.Nan holds the Advanced Practitioner status in the Workplace, Training and Family Sections of the Association for Conflict Resolution.Nan is considered a national expert in high conflict family systems and mediates protracted familial disputes in 19 states. Over 40 percent of her caseload is in federal mediation, and specializes in the areas of employment, EEOC, ADA, and workplace violence, hostile work environment, public dialoging, crisis management, post-traumatic stress disorder, and critical incident debriefing.

In response to the international geo-political crisis, she became part of the founding team to develop the non-profit organization, Mediators Beyond Borders International and has served on the Board of Directors for 6 years. Over the last three years she helped to develop the Training & Research, and Events Divisions. She was also a member of the Hurricane Katrina Project for MBB in New Orleans and Biloxi.

In 2009, Nan developed the International Ambassadors Program, the worked on the Internship Program and was instrumental in launching the first Professional Country Chapter outside the US, MBB Italy. She is now working on the MBB Greek Dialogues to be held in Athens in 2013.

In 2004, she designed and remains the lead facilitator for the Rocky Mountain Retreat, teaching holistic and reflective practice to Judges, lawyers, mediators, conflict practitioners and peace-builders from over 21 countries and 45 states. The retreat was gifted to ACR for 2010 and beyond. She also served on the Board of Directors for the Global Negotiation Insight Institute; formerly the Harvard Negotiation Insight Initiative. In 1997, Nan was part of a 14 member professional delegation to Russia and Poland as a Citizens’ Ambassador for Mediation and she presented at the Moscow State University College of Law. In 2009 she was the 6th Kaplan Lecturer at the Pittsburgh Bar Association Spring Legal Forum, presenting on Spiritual Intelligence in Intractable Conflict, and facilitated the MBB Congress.

Nan has presented nationally at the ABA/DR, AFCC, and ACR conferences and has been a guest lecturer at Hamline Law School in St. Paul, MN. She led a Mediators Beyond Borders Ambassador’s Mission to China, Mongolia, and Korea in April of 2009, and presented on behalf of MBB in Germany and Italy in September 2009. In 2010, she led a delegation of 20 Mediators to Europe to present in Florence, Italy to the Mayor’s Council and University of Rome for MBB.

She presented in Slovenia and Germany in 2011 and Italy and Portugal on her Master Practitioner Series. She will present in Athens, Greece and Budapest, Hungary in 2013.

Nan has been adjunct faculty at Regis University since 1999 where she teaches Conflict Theory, Theories of Collaborative Negotiation, Advanced Mediation, and Persuasion in the graduate and undergraduate programs. Nan founded the Regis University Mediation Project, active from 1995-1998.

She serves as one of the faculty advisors to the Regis University/Colorado Professional Chapter of Mediators Beyond Borders. She has done post graduate work at Harvard University Law School Program on Negotiation in Advanced Mediation, and at Duke University and UCLA in Neuroscience and Conflict.

Nan co-authored and has taught the co-parenting education seminar “In the Best Interest of the Children” for 14 years. She authored and developed the level two high conflict classes “Growing through Conflict” in 2001, and has served thousands of bi-nuclear families statewide and in the Denver metro area. Nan is recognized as an expert in divorced family systems and specializes in high conflict marital mediation, and divorce mediation.

Nan is also an award winning author of a daily spiritual practice book entitled Calm in the Face of the Storm: Spiritual Daily Practice for the Peacemaker, the winner of the 2008 Gold Medal for Spirituality/Inspiration at the National Independent Book Publishers Awards, [IPPY], presented in Los Angeles. www.calminthefaceofthestorm.com; or www.amazon.com You can contact Nan at Nan@disputepro.com.

Chris Rubacky is an entrepreneur, mediator, and trainer.  He has led trainings in mediation, conflict resolution, interest-based negotiations, special education mediation, stress reduction, and emotional literacy/anger management for schools, parent groups, non-profit organizations and men’s jails.  He is proud to have partnered with and led workshops for a number of established training organizations on both coasts including Peer Mediation Programs (New Jersey), Bucks County Peace Center (Pennsylvania), Baltimore Mediation, Peninsula Conflict Resolution Center (PCRC, San Mateo County, California), and Community Boards of San Francisco, where he was fortunate to have traveled throughout California, Nevada and as far as Alaska in leading peer and community mediation trainings.

Chris first became interested in the study of Conflict Resolution while earning his Master’s Degree from American University in Washington, DC in Special Education, with a focus on working with emotionally disturbed children.    His Bachelor’s degree is from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

He is proud to have been a Community Mediator/Panel Member for Community Boards of San Francisco (CBSF), where he lived for close to a decade.  The enormously diverse population and fantastic training tradition of CBSF provided excellent experience in working with a wide range of civil disputes, as well as in cross-cultural communication and transformative mediation.

Originally trained in Mediation by the New Mexico Center for Dispute Resolution, in the mid-1990’s Chris earned his certification as a trainer in mediation and collaborative negotiation by now retired mediator Bill Lincoln. He benefited from Mr. Lincoln’s reputation as both a pioneer in interest-based bargaining (ala the Harvard Negotiation Project) and as a seasoned international mediator.

In 2002, Chris formed his own legal staffing agency, CVR Search.  In 2014, Chris was moved to go back to his roots in dispute resolution, when he received his certificate in Workplace Mediation from Louise Phipps-Senft and Baltimore Mediation.   Baltimore Mediation’s transformative model and emphasis on improving relationships through quality dialogue has felt like home ever since.  In late 2015, Chris began helping with select consulting and coaching for Baltimore Mediation.

In addition to his consulting work for Louise and Baltimore Mediation, Chris recently opened his own mediation practice, Relate and Mediate.net.  He helps resolve disputes primarily relating to workplace matters and in support of the families of U.S. Veterans, with particular emphasis on communities surrounding veterans with PTSD/Moral Injury.

As an avid fan of the mystic poet Rumi, fiction, and the great outdoors, Chris lives in the Boulder, Colorado area with his fabulous wife Jennifer and wonder-filled daughter, Gabriella.  A daily meditation practice strongly informs his relational mediation practice.  Along with Jennifer, he also runs monthly groups on meditation and relationships for area couples.

Nicole Davis, Ph.D., is a certified mediator, facilitator, conflict coach, harassment prevention expert, and conflict skills trainer with over 20 years of experience in the field of alternative dispute resolution. As an associate with the Baltimore Mediation team, she emphasizes utilizing a transformative approach as people seek to resolve their conflicts, eradicate communication barriers, or enrich their interactions and relationships with others. Her focus areas are family, church, workplace, and organizational leadership.

Nicole’s doctorate from Nova Southeastern University, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, is in the field of Conflict Analysis and Resolution. She holds a master’s degree in International Management from the University of Maryland, and a bachelor’s degree in Social Work from Morgan State University. Nicole’s background includes work with state and federal agencies, non-profit organizations, church congregations, circuit courts of Baltimore City, Baltimore and Howard Counties, Prince George’s County Executive’s Office and law enforcement, and educational systems at the secondary and collegiate levels.

Nicole, a native of Akron, OH, is an author of various books on marriage, parenting, and personal leadership, and co-founder of Empower to Engage, a mediation and coaching firm. She is also an ordained pastor, a United States Navy veteran, a wife, and mother of two adult sons.