The setting of goals or benchmarks is an essential component for a quality ADR program. Without those, a program can lack clarity of purpose and have no ability to gauge its impact on those it is serving. When we set those goals, however, it is important to ensure they are the right ones. Via Genuine Evaluation come these two gems from the health field in Australia and the UK: (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘court programs’
Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize
Jennifer Shack, November 26th, 2010Courts as Ecosystems
Susan M. Yates, November 17th, 2010Earlier this week at a gathering in Baltimore where administrators, program evaluators and researchers provided input on Maryland’s plan for a comprehensive study of court ADR in the state, Heather Anderson commented that the court system resembles an ecosystem. (Heather is a brilliant staffer for the Judicial Council of California, Administrative Office of the Courts, and an incredibly dedicated, knowledgeable worker in the court ADR field.)
This idea of the court system as an ecosystem makes good sense. A quick definition of ecosystems from Encarta lends itself to courts: “a localized group of interdependent organisms together with the environment that they inhabit and depend on.” Heather also pointed out that individual courts can be seen as microecosystems. Ever-trusty Wikipedia says microecosystems “can exist in locations which are precisely defined by critical environmental factors within small or tiny spaces.”
Why is this metaphor so meaningful? Because it reminds those of us who work to develop and improve court ADR systems that nothing works in isolation. There is interdependence of entities within the courts – lawyers, judges, neutrals, administrators – and external environmental factors – politics, economy, society – that have a significant impact on how court ADR programs are established and refined. All of these factors need to be taken into consideration when working with courts to develop or improve their ADR programs.
Honoring Judge Martin
Jennifer Shack, September 30th, 2010Last night, RSI presented its Service to Community Award to Honorable Patricia Martin, Presiding Judge of the Child Protection Division of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois. The award is granted to “an individual whose cumulative activities have substantially and meaningfully furthered and enhanced court-annexed ADR systems in the State of Illinois.” RSI presented the award at a reception for Northern Illinois University College of Law alumni who are now judges. (more…)
Overcoming Fear of Failure
Jennifer Shack, August 20th, 2010FAILFaire is a gathering of technology non-profits to share stories of failure and give an award to the worst one. The purpose is to learn from each other’s failures and not replicate them. According to a New York Times article on FAILFaire, non-profits are leery of revealing failures because it may turn off donors and thus harm those they are trying to help. This type of thinking has led many not to examine the reasons behind failures, instead focusing on what has worked rather than what has not. There is a school of thought that says we can learn more from our – and others’– mistakes than we can from our successes.
So, in the interest of improving monitoring and evaluation practices, I’m going to share RSI’s worst failure. RSI was working with an Illinois court to develop a monitoring system for its family mediation program. The system we came up with included case management data that the Clerk’s Office collected, along with data collected by the court through post-mediation reports and questionnaires. In Illinois, the Clerk’s Office is an entirely separate governmental entity from the court system, with an elected Clerk in each county. We thought the best approach, then, would be to create software that would download data from the Clerk’s database into the database for the program. This would eliminate the need to re-enter the Clerk’s data as well as the constant need for the Clerk to send that data to court staff. In essence, the Clerk’s database and our database would be connected, but not integrated. It seemed like a good way to reduce the amount of work that staff would have to do in order to monitor the program. (more…)
