This is Part 2 of a two-part piece focusing on how family lawyers and mediators can participate in and support the Youth Voices Initiative. Originally published on Slaw.ca, Canada’s Online Legal Magazine and republished with permission. In Part 1, I described the foundations of the Youth Voices Initiative, overseen by the BC Family Justice Innovation Lab, which […]
Read postThis is Part 1 of a two-part piece focusing on how family lawyers and mediators can participate in and support the Youth Voices Initiative. It was originally published in September 2020 on Slaw.ca, Canada’s Online Legal Magazine and republished with permission. It has been 10 years since Brené Brown published her book The Gifts of Imperfection. […]
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Two years ago I published a piece on slaw.ca entitled Seeing (And Feeling) the Family Justice System Through the Eyes of the Therapy Dog about Ollie the therapy dog who visited the Kamloops courthouse on “family remand day”. One comment on that post really stuck in my mind. It was from a family lawyer who […]
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In the summer of 2019, the Lab received a very warm invitation to work with a group from Ulster University in Northern Ireland. Led by Professor Gráinne McKeever, the group was eager to use a human-centred design process as part of their research project to create and test supports for litigants in person (“LIPS”) in […]
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This recent blog post from IAALS (Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System) caught my eye and my imagination. It begins by noting the 2016 Cases Without Counsel study (Note 1) which highlighted the struggle of people trying to navigate the family justice system without their own lawyer and includes the following comment […]
Read postThe BC Family Justice Innovation Lab employs an approach we call “systemic human-centred design”. The first phase of the model is “discovery” of the experiences of the users (the people the system is intended to serve), in our case the human beings who are involved in separation and divorce in BC. We have written before […]
Read postThis article is re-posted from our recent contribution to Slaw dot ca, Canada’s wonderful national online legal magazine. The BC Family Justice Innovation Lab is focusing on improving the well-being of BC families and children experiencing separation and divorce. One of its ‘home-grown’ initiatives is called “Youth Voices” as it focuses on the experience and […]
Read postWe held our sensemaking and ideation workshop on the Youth Voices Initiative on January 28, 2018. We will be publishing more detailed information in this page soon but, in the meantime, we are excited to share some of the tools we used for the workshop in case they are useful for other designers. First, huge […]
Read postIn our February post we promised to provide more details about some of the insights coming out of the Youth Voices Workshop in January. I believe it is too early for true “insights” – they will come from the next stage of our work (discovery). However, I can report on the actual output from the […]
Read postIn 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 […]
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