Our friends at Nesta have been working on a new competency framework to define the key skills, attitudes and behaviours that public sector innovators combine in order to successfully solve public problems. Check out this wonderful post for more details. This is difficult work. I was heartened to see confirmation of the various “tensions” that […]
In New Zealand, mediation is mandatory for families before they seek the assistance of the court for parenting arrangements arising from separation and divorce. Policy and legislation was introduced in 2014 to require mediation because of well-established evidence that mediation was more affordable, faster and produced better outcomes for families than the court system. A […]
The National Action Committee on Access to Justice held its annual meeting in Vancouver earlier this month. Members of the committee and others keenly interested in access to justice from across the country gathered to share ideas, experiences and stories. On March 22, 2017, the day prior to the actual meeting, the NAC organized a […]
Previous posts have tackled the important question of why engaging with system users (in our case BC families experiencing separation and divorce) is critical to effective justice reform. Some may continue to believe that this is an unnecessary step since system professionals (judges, lawyers, government policy people, academics etc.) have all of the knowledge and […]
On January 22, 2017 we gathered with a very courageous group of young adults who were willing to share stories about their experience of the parents’ divorce. This was the first step of our Youth Voices Initiative which is using a human-centred design process to maintain or improve the well-being of children faced with separation […]
Happy New Year everyone! One of the purposes of the BC Family Justice Innovation Lab is to create a space (or platform) for meaningful conversations about how to address the complex adaptive challenge of supporting family well-being as they journey through separation and divorce. The traditional method of gathering justice “insiders” to diagnose the problem […]
This is the fifth in a series of posts about HOW we can begin to put the public first in justice design. In the family justice system we rarely hear the voices of children who are experiencing the separation or divorce of their parents. Despite the legal principle that the “best interests of the child” […]
Social media is abuzz with the news that our friends at the National Self-Represented Litigants Project have been nominated for a prestigious award. the NSRLP’s new National Database of Professionals Assisting SRLs has been nominated for the American Bar Association’s Louis M. Brown Award for Legal Access! Dayna Cornwall, Project Coordinator with the NSRLP, advises: This award is […]
The Lab is moving ahead with the “Youth Voices Initiative“. The purpose of the initiative is to support the well-being of youth whose families experienced separation and divorce. Research shows that the divorce process can be very damaging for children as their well-being is closely linked to the level of conflict between their parents and […]
In the first three parts of this series I described the thoughts I contributed to the Justice Design Project on how to put the public first in justice system reform. This post attempts to build on that very important theme. I follow Richard Zorza‘s Access to Justice Blog. Richard is one of my justice heroes […]