Sadly our colleague, Alvin Johnson, passed away on June 7, 2023. His life story can be read here. Mel and Alvin were making plans to resume their program, Community Conversations (now Common Ground) this fall. Alvin will be greatly missed.

Accord Mediation can now offer video mediation through Zoom, if that is more comfortable to you in this period of health concerns.  Remember as well, our office offers a small environment with bathrooms only used by the people in our building which we own and control.

Does it matter if the mediator is black, white, or some other race or ethnicity?  Or, does it matter if the mediator is female, or male, or young, or old?  You can find some answers and arguments about these issues quickly using a Google search.  The questions are timely, but the answers are often politicized. […]

Use of racial terms provides a flash point with a quick reaction on social media, and institutionally that is differentially applied by race, but can be expected due to the history of slavery, personal racism and structural racism in our society.  Even so, this differential application of sanctions leads to feelings of persecution and banishment […]

Today our society has sides staked out in vivid relief and information comes at us much more rapidly than in the past. This causes a retreat to pattern thinking (McLuhan, Kaufman) to be able to order the information. A by-product of this need to order in response to the overwhelming flow of information is the […]