9:00 am | Keynote Speaker Judge Binns

9:35 am | Taming the Tempest: Working with High-Conflict Emotions in a Family Dispute Resolution Context with David Stebbing

David will present a framework for understanding the emotional roots of high-conflict family disputes, explaining how and why these conflicts arise, and offering strategies for navigating this challenging terrain. He will introduce several practical techniques to help parties manage their difficult emotions and suggest methods for each of them to avoid the escalation of tensions during negotiations.

10:30 am | Morning Break

11:00 am | A Session of Two Halves:

Child Inclusion for all children: the benefits of child-focused psychoeducation

Join Tarryn Skilling in this interactive session that demonstrates the role and benefits of utilising Child Inclusion Specialists to provide psychoeducation to parties. This pathway not only helps to overcome barriers in creating a child-inclusive process, especially for children under 5, but can also enhance the efficacy of parenting plans and facilitate better child-focused outcomes for children and families in FDR.

Leaning in: mediator and child specialist interactions

With our new Child Inclusive Mediation process well and truly entrenched within the FDR framework, it is imperative that mediators and child specialists continue to explore how they can best combine their respective professional expertise to support parents and their tamariki. This interactive session with Suzanne Alliston and Bill Rainey will look at the importance and appropriateness of information sharing and how by working together, we can facilitate better outcomes for the whanau we support.

12:00 pm | Lunch

1:00 pm | Tikanga restoring the balance: The power of authentic participation sincerity and apology with Helen Bowen and Lance Ryan

Joining us virtually, Helen Bowen and Lance Ryan will discuss answers and reveal insights into the following:

• All participants are injured

• How might we get hurt people to attend, listen deeply and participate wholeheartedly

• What is RJ (Restorative Justice) and what are the procedural safeguards?

• Key elements and strengths

• The role of separate preliminary meetings for authentic deep listening, sincerity & apology –

• Pre conference: what about when people don’t really want to attend …. The best person to be listening to all of what you want to say directly to the other party is in this process. A forum where there are things that you may need to hear and say

2:00 pm | Strengths based Approaches to working with Queer Youth with Rhion Munro

I’m looking forward to introducing you to my community. Transgender and non-binary people are taonga and valued whānau members in households across Aotearoa. This is an opportunity for us to kōrero and understand a bit more about them, a vibrant and resilient community of people who are on an intergenerational journey toward achieving equity.

We will briefly explore the current cultural context, discuss how we facilitate mana enhancing environments, and explore some strengths-based approaches and positive youth development frameworks that will enrich your practice and add to your kete of intersectional knowledge. 

2:50 pm | Afternoon Break

3:10 pm | Panel session and Q&A with Judge Binns, Brintyn Smith, Yashika Chandhok, Keri Morris, David Robinson and Gaye Greenwood

There is a wonderful line up in the panel of a family court judge, a family barrister, an expert on intercultural negotiation, an expert of online safety, a seasoned FDR provider and PFM provider.  If any of your burning questions you have when you first come to the hui are not answered during the 2 days, this session is your chance to ask those questions, or if you have further unanswered questions having attended any of the sessions.  The session will be facilitated by Rosemarie. 

4:00 pm | End of day