Mark Kleiman

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Mark Kleiman, Esq. began his career as an attorney in Family Court for the Juvenile Rights Division of The Legal Aid Society. Recognizing the system as inadequate to deal with family issues, he founded and has been executive director of Community Mediation Services, Inc. in New York City since 1983. Since then he has developed court diversion programs across the city in the areas of juvenile justice, community and family mediation, education, child welfare, youth development and homelessness. Programs include: the Court-funded community mediation program for Queens, a Fatherhood Program, Homelessness Prevention Program, a Restorative Justice Program for Delinquents as well as the first New York City-wide Family Court Custody Mediation Program. Mark was a founding member of both the New York City and New York State divorce mediation councils, a former board member of the New York State Dispute Resolution Association (NYSDRA) and former board member of The National Association for Community Mediation (NAFCM). As a founding member of Mediators Beyond Borders, he has established a partnership between CMS and Mosaica, the community mediation program in Jerusalem as part of MBB’s Israel Project. An Office of Court Administration certified trainer, he co-authored the court’s first custody/visitation mediation curriculum. He also co-wrote a conflict resolution curriculum for Americorps volunteers for NAFCM. Mr. Kleiman has created the Values-Centered Mediation model, an approach to mediation, and has trained over 750 mediators in this model. He is the 2011 winner of NYSDRA’s Lawrence Cooke award for Innovation in Mediation and the 2013 Association for Conflict Resolution’s John M. Haynes Distinguished Mediator Award.