About 75% of our work is with nonprofit organizations, and includes:

• training all staff on interpersonal skills and dealing with everyday conflicts at work;

• training managerial staff on the vital people leadership skills they need, like active listening, one-on-one meetings, and managing higher-lever leaders;

• facilitating meetings of external interested parties, like community groups, state regulators, or affected industry representatives;

• facilitating board or leadership retreats;

• mediating issues that are higher-stakes or complex, such as ED-Board Chair arguments or co-leader problems.

So who are the other 25% of our clients?

• We’ve served brick-and-mortar small businesses locally (Northern Virginia).

• We’ve worked with mission-driven, growing tech companies.

• And we also support individual leaders of nonprofits through our learning cohort, Leading Through Conflict Mastery.

We offer a variety of facilitation and training services, as well as workplace mediation and mediation for disputes among nonprofit board members or board members and executive directors.

Facilitation services focus on helping groups find clarity and consensus, which means all voices are heard and diverse ideas considered before the group chooses its path.

Training programs are designed to spread these types of facilitation skills and people management skills to everyone, typically in a multiple part training designed to combat the forgetting curse. Everything is tailored to help you move forward with clarity and confidence.

Mediation is facilitative, designed to guide people in conflict through the difficult conversation they need to have and keep avoiding, the conversation that drives the decisions that need to be made, the ones that hold back the organization when they don’t get made.

Yes! Mediation is a great investment when there is a conflict between board members or a board member and the nonprofit’s Executive Director.

Facilitation helps boards find alignment and true consensus - creating space for all board members to air dissenting opinions, for example, rather than silently disagree so that staff and Board Executive Volunteers think there’s agreement when there isn’t.

We can adapt any of our services to either in-person or online sessions. This includes mediation, facilitation, training, and the EQ-i assessment.

When we work online, our preference is to use the CM&F Zoom account. However, we can adapt to the client’s preferred apps when requested.

If one of the parties is dead set against mediation, we cannot mediate.

However, we use individual consultations to explore precisely why someone might not want to mediate. We work with both parties to help them feel comfortable with the process.

If mediation cannot happen, we offer consulting services to manage the conflict and help leaders figure out next steps.

Facilitative mediation is a set process that focuses on the specific conflict being experienced.

Facilitative mediators do not recommend a specific outcome, but may offer suggestions.

In facilitative mediation, we recognize that healing a relationship is not the expected outcome - but it can be a byproduct of discussing the conflict with one of our mediators.

In facilitative mediation, the parties should expect to experience an orientation to the mediation process, a storytelling time in which both parties get to share their own experiences, a brainstorming time in which both parties and the mediator get creative about possible outcomes, and, finally, a resolution-focused discussion.

It depends! Mediation can help people to preserve what’s important to them. However in most mediations, there is a negotiation, which often leads to the parties compromising.

In mediation, no one is forced to agree. Mediation is voluntary. If you’re not comfortable with something, say so!

If you are concerned about confidentiality, a formal mediation is the best way to ensure it. Facilitated conversations don’t offer the same protections.

When we mediate, we explain clearly at the very beginning of the process what is and what is not confidential.

We offer two main types of facilitation:

(1) Facilitated conversations - in rare conflict cases, the parties are just more comfortable with a flexible approach. These are private conversations, but they don’t necessarily offer the structure or confidentiality of mediation.

(2) Group facilitation - these vary widely based on client needs. Excellent use cases are: Leadership retreats, multi-stakeholder engagement, strategic planning, and process co-creation.

We have few employees, and work with a wide range of partners with varying expertise. Some of our partners are:

• Certified mediators

• Certified coaches

• Certified facilitators

• Certified virtual facilitators

• Certified trainers

In our co-creation process, we make sure we have the right people in place with the best expertise to resolve your organization’s particular problems.

Of course! Our approaches to mediation and facilitation seek to be inclusive of all voices and experiences. While no one is perfect, we welcome being called out and educated - even while we strive to NOT put anyone into the position where they have to do that.

For both mediation and facilitation, we spend a significant amount of time in preparation - both with and without our clients’ presence. Our focus is to put ourselves into the shoes of our participants, including thought experiments about various experiences people may bring into the room or various different ways that people’s brains think - including neurodivergent people, and people under high amounts of stress. A gentle check-in from the neutral mediator/facilitator to see “what else are you thinking about?” or “what different opinions are there?” is often enough to bring new or more difficult ideas into the room.