Angela has many years of education and work experience in the field of dispute resolution. She has trained and provided volunteer service as a mentor with the Restorative Justice Victoria Chapter. She has certificates in coaching & mentoring and in conflict negotiation and has worked in areas such as workplace disputes, family law, advocacy and oversight in policing and health care. An avid life-long learner, Angela is currently working on completing her masters thesis in Dispute Resolution with the University of Victoria. she is also currently completing an Indigenous Learning certificate through the University of Alberta. In her previous work Angela provided mediation services to parents going through separation or divorce, and now works in the field of child welfare providing facilitation and mediation services to families on the Sunshine Coast.
I came to work in the field of dispute resolution after studying at the undergraduate level in the disciplines of sociology and social work. Studying the social world and the realms of social justice, anti-oppressive practice and the wide expanse of social theory within these disciplines kindled a curiosity in conflict and all the ways that it manifests into dispute – from family and interpersonal conflict (divorce, parent-teen, elder mediation) to workplace conflict, to administrative/citizen service conflict. I am interested in the many ways that we define and manage conflict as a society, as individual family systems, through friendship and from the cultural mosaic that is our world. I am interested in how conflict is seen, experienced, transmitted and resolved by individuals across age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, power, and political divides.
From this belief I focus on the generative potential in conflict by working with clients to explore the elements inherent to resolving conflict – pillars like communication, good faith and trust. I use ideas and techniques from the interest-based and transformative paradigms of dispute resolution theory, working with clients to explore the meaning behind a conflict and the fact that often conflict is generated over conflicting values, embedded concerns and fears about things such as power, role strain, or identity, to name a few. We explore emotions and how they’re connected to value systems, and the different ways they are expressed and repressed. With these discussions, insight is gained into conflict dynamics.
Contact Angela here: angela@vkwellness.ca
