An Important Year for IACP, an Exciting Year Ahead. I’ve just returned to Milan, Italy, from the 20th Networking and Educational IACP Forum in Chicago and I can still feel all the energy and excitement that was in the air. This was a fabulous Forum, with over 430 participants coming from 14 different countries who shared wisdom, enthusiasm, competence and compassion. IACP is a truly international organization and the global thread that keeps us all together was tangible at the Forum in the attendance, in the workshops and in the plenaries. I want to thank our Executive Director Anne Tamar-Mattis and all of our staff, who did a marvelous job in making this happen, our sponsors and exhibitors, without whom the Forum could not be as it is and all our donors – Sustaining Links, Leadership Links and Count Me In: none of this could be possible without you! A special thanks goes to our Forum Local Host Committee, the Thousand Merry Monkeys, you were simply amazing! As a Collaborative lawyer from Italy, fairly new to this world compared to many other practitioners (I was first trained in 2010), I am truly honored and grateful to be the first non-North American president of this organization, that counts members in 25 countries and six continents. I will do my best to keep the focus of IACP on the global world we live in, while non-forgetting the precious perspective of each local community, how small or large it may be. This will be an important year for IACP. From an international perspective, we will be reconnecting with the Collaborative practitioners in Australia and New Zealand, we will strengthen our ties with the Collaborative communities in Europe, we will continue our efforts to help building Collaborative Practice roots in Asia, through training and mentoring, we will explore new ways to cooperate with the practitioners in South America, in particular in Panama and Brazil. At the same time, we will continue to provide presence and commitment to all the Practice Groups wherever they are and strive to make Collaborative Practice available to a more wide and diverse community of practitioners and of clients. If we believe, as we all do, that Collaborative Practice is a way to transform how families deal with conflict, then this is the path we must follow, with courage and perseverance. But to do this, we need everybody’s support. Please join one of our committees and help IACP serve its mission. The expression of interest form is online, and you can send yours by the deadline of November 21st. Following our educational side, we have also planned to continue our online educational program, through monthly webinars available for members (at a discounted rate) and for non-members, and we will start to explore online advanced trainings through a series by Mark Weiss starting next January. Our Trainers Faculty, with trainers from Canada, United States, Brazil, Italy and Australia, is available for Introductory Trainings in multiple languages and in different countries. In other words, this will be an exciting year! I do hope you will all be able to come to Toronto in 2020. Please take some time and mark your calendars for our 21st Annual Networking and Educational Forum in Toronto, October 22-25, 2020. I look forward to seeing you all there, while we enter the third decade of our history.
Sincerely, Francesca King
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