Amplifying the voices that shape dispute resolution.
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Convening a global community of conflict specialists, negotiators, peacemakers, and innovators — in reflective exchange.
For twenty-five years the NYC-DR Roundtable has platformed cutting-edge research, bold theories, and too-often-unheard voices from every corner of the field. Every voice, one table, the first Thursday of every month.
Long before the archive went online, the Roundtable gathered practitioners face to face at John Jay College — from dispute resolvers' response to 9/11, through restorative justice, implicit bias, interfaith dialogue, police-community relations, and reconciliation across divides. Those conversations built the community, and the trust, that the world now joins each month.
A partnership at the heart of the field
The Roundtable is convened and co-sponsored by two institutions that have anchored New York's dispute resolution community for decades.
What the Roundtable is
On September 20, 2001, dispute resolvers gathered over breakfast to ask what they could do for their wounded city. They never stopped meeting.
What began as a crisis response became an institution. For twenty-five years the NYC-DR Monthly Roundtable Breakfast has convened mediators, arbitrators, ombuds, educators, judges, and peacebuilders — from courthouses, universities, government agencies, and private practice — to learn from one another and from the field's leading thinkers.
More than 300 sessions have addressed everything the discipline touches: negotiation and impasse, restorative justice and community violence, implicit bias, interfaith dialogue, disaster response, and today the arrival of artificial intelligence in the practice of dispute resolution.
The Roundtable is free, open, and deliberately non-commercial. Since moving online in 2020 it has grown from a New York breakfast into a global gathering, with every session recorded and preserved for the practitioners who follow.
Facilitators & conveners
The Roundtable is sustained by a team of practitioner-conveners who host each session, curate speakers, and steward the community month after month.
Professor of Sociology and Director of the Dispute Resolution Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and Director of the CUNY Dispute Resolution Center. An internationally known scholar, she has written extensively on dispute resolution processes — particularly mediation, police use of mediation, and barriers to minority participation in the field — and her career has been recognized with numerous honors, including the 2023 Chuck M. Newman Award. She convenes and opens the Roundtable each month.
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Founder of Nikisky Consulting SAS in Paris and a global dispute resolution professional working as a mediator, teacher, and strategic consultant. Her work lives where conflict meets creativity — facilitating hard conversations across borders and cultures and helping organizations rethink how they approach conflict. She co-hosts the Roundtable and leads much of its operational backbone.
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Assistant Professor of Sociology at John Jay College, specializing in conflict resolution. She completed her doctorate in International Conflict Management at Kennesaw State University, researching organizational conflict, cross-cultural communication, ADR, and virtual team dynamics. Her work appears in journals including Negotiation Journal and Conflict Resolution Quarterly, where she serves on the editorial board.
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Mediator, consultant, strategic planner, and investigator. Through Elizabeth Grossman Consulting she mediates employment discrimination and civil rights matters before the federal and New York State courts. She serves as a volunteer mediator with the New York Peace Institute and as Board Member and Treasurer of ACR-GNY, and previously led the Fair Housing Justice Center. She holds a J.D. from the University of Michigan.
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Attorney and senior conflict resolution professional with over 17 years of federal service at the U.S. Department of Justice Community Relations Service, resolving community conflicts involving race, color, and national origin. He has led high-stakes interventions and trained new specialists, combining conciliation and mediation with deep public-policy grounding. He holds a J.D. from Cardozo School of Law and a B.A. from Columbia University.
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Founder of Untangled Resolutions, where she works as a divorce coach and family mediator supporting clients through high-stakes family conflict. Her practice helps people clarify what matters most, manage emotional intensity, and participate effectively in difficult negotiations. She brings together training in law, organizational development, and professional coaching.
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Mediator, executive coach, and creator of Conflict YES. With over 20 years of experience across financial services, nonprofits, pharmaceuticals, construction, and higher education, he helps senior leaders build collaborative teams. An ICF-accredited coach and Georgetown Institute for Transformative Leadership graduate, he holds a Master's from Cornell and a B.S. from New York University.
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Every session, 2001–2026
Each bar is one Roundtable. Height is registrations where records exist (2017 onward). The step-change in April 2020 — the pivot from a John Jay conference room to Zoom — is visible to the naked eye, and it never receded. Hover any bar for the topic.
One decision tripled the room — permanently
When the pandemic closed the breakfast room, the Roundtable moved online in three weeks. Six years later, attendance has not regressed: a structural expansion of the field's commons, not a pandemic spike.
Average registrations per session, limited by a physical room in midtown Manhattan.
Average registrations per session, sustained across six consecutive years.
Half loyal core, half fresh faces — every year
A rare dual signature: roughly half of each year's registrants are new to the Roundtable, while a deep returning core keeps growing. The community renews itself and retains itself at once.
From a monthly meeting to a permanent commons
Twenty-five years of sessions are a longitudinal record of how a field evolved. The next phase makes that record a living, searchable public asset.
The Living Archive
Every session, speaker, and recording indexed and searchable — the institutional memory of the field.
Explore the library →Ask the Roundtable
An AI assistant trained on 25 years of session transcripts, answering practitioner questions with citations to specific sessions.
An Independent Platform
Community-owned registration and connection tools — letting the 600-person core find each other between first Thursdays.
Sustained Operations
Dedicated capacity to produce, document, and steward the Roundtable for its next 25 years, at the CUNY Dispute Resolution Center.
A retrieval-augmented assistant trained on transcripts from 25 years of sessions, answering questions with citations to the exact sessions where the field's voices addressed them. Try a question:
Preview shown with pre-composed answers drawn from real session records. The funded system will answer any question live from full session transcripts, with clickable timestamps into the video archive.
25 years of voices, connected
Every speaker who has taken the Roundtable's virtual and in-person stage — and the organizations, universities, and themes that connect them. Explore the web of a field, or browse the full roster. Drag the map, click any node.
Join the community
Three ways to keep the Roundtable in your month — watch every session, join the field's conversation, and never miss what's next.
Watch on YouTube
Every session, recorded and free. Subscribe to catch new talks and explore 25 years of the field's best thinking.
Subscribe on YouTubeJoin the NYC-DR listserv
Prof. Maria Volpe's CUNY dispute resolution listserv — announcements, opportunities, and conversation across the field's community.
Subscribe to the listservRoundtable newsletter
A note before each first-Thursday session — the topic, the speakers, the link. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.