Steven Haberfeld Ph. D. serves as the Executive Director and the Senior Negotiator/Mediator on the staff of Indian Dispute Resolution Service, Inc. Along with a consortium of five Indian organizations, he is one of the founders of IDRS in 1989 and the principle designer of its training and service delivery program.

Dr. Haberfeld has over thirty-five years experience as a community organizer, negotiator, mediator and trainer in multi-cultural and multi-ethnic settings. He has worked in Mexican farm-worker, African American, low-income White, and American Indian communities. Dr. Haberfeld has been working with Indian tribes since 1976, assisting leaders to resolve internal differences and to effectively negotiate their interests in complex transactions with governmental, political and private sector interests.

Dr. Haberfeld has also been involved as an intermediary facilitating dialogues and increasing collaboration between tribes and federal and state agencies, political jurisdictions, and public institutions (public school districts) and their constituents. In January 2000, he was recognized by the Sacramento Bee for having been the “driving force” in securing the historic agreement between the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe in California and the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management in the Department of Interior. The negotiated agreement called for the creation of a 10,000 acre land base, specific ground water allocations, and environmental resource management and economic development opportunities for the Tribe in its ancestral homeland, inside and outside the Death Valley National Park in California and Nevada.

Dr. Haberfeld has been a mediator since 1981. He has been involved in every major mediation that IDRS has been associated with since its inception fifteen years ago. He is also a Mediator and Associate Trainer with Conflict Resolution Institute--CRI ( Tacoma, WA), He is a past Board Member of the California Dispute Resolution Council.

Since 1980, Dr. Haberfeld has maintained a private mediation practice, Haberfeld Mediation Group, specializing in resolving business, community, workplace, and public policy disputes. He has extensive experience training and resolving disputes between labor and management in over eight different public and private hospitals in the state of Washington. Dr. Haberfeld's private practice has included work in Cuba as a member of a small team that trained the Cuban foreign diplomatic corps in negotiation skills and processes, and in Guatemala where he provided negotiation training to representatives of the military, government and guerrilla forces as part of the country's national reconciliation effort.

Stan Sitnick J.D. is a Senior Associate Trainer and Mediator with Indian Dispute Resolution Services, Inc. Mr. Sitnick has provided mediation and facilitation services, and training in cross-cultural communication, negotiation and mediation skills and processes to IDRS clients throughout the country. He is a talented practitioner with over twenty-five years of experience in the field of non-adversarial dispute resolution.

Mr. Sitnick currently is on the faculty of Portland State University in Portland Oregon. As an Adjunct Professor, he has teaching responsibilities in the Masters Program in Dispute Resolution and maintains a private practice providing mediation, facilitation and training services. He specializes in domestic relations, civil litigation, family, workplace and public policy settings. He also provides training to governmental units, businesses and organizations in conflict resolution, interest-based negotiation, mediation, team-building and intercultural communication.

In the past, he served as the Program Coordinator for the Clackamas County Dispute Resolution Center (CCDRC) in Oregon. In this capacity, he directed the community-based mediation program serving county residents in a wide variety of cases involving neighborhood, community, landlord/tenant, governmental, workplace, family, school and criminal disputes. He was responsible for program management and development, training and supervision of staff and volunteers, mediation of sensitive and complex cases and professional trainings in conflict resolution and mediation.

At one time he served as a U.S. Speaker and Specialist Consultant with the U.S. Department of State’s Office of International Information Programs to provide mediation training for school administrators and government officials in Windhoek, Namibia. He served as the Litigation Director for Oregon Legal Services and Multnomah County Legal Aid Service, and as a consultant to National Legal Services Corporation in the areas of lawyer training and program evaluation.

Kathryn Manness, LCSW (Huron) serves as a Senior Associate at Indian Dispute Resolution Services (IDRS) and as a practitioner in a full array of collaborative and dispute resolution processes (advocacy, community organizing, public participation, facilitation, and mediation).

Ms. Manness received her formal training in negotiation, mediation and facilitation from IDRS. Before coming to IDRS, she had over twenty-five years of broad management experience and substantive expertise in health planning, development, service delivery and education/training. Most of her work has been in Indian country for Indian organizations.

During her long career in the health and social services fields, Ms. Manness gained a reputation as an unusually innovative problem-solver. She has been especially effective in bridging the cultural divide, and organizing and facilitating community, statewide and national “collaboratives” among non-Indian and Indian agencies and organizations to pool resources and expertise to address problems of common concern.

Immediately before coming to IDRS, Ms. Manness served as the Program and Clinical Supervisor at the Seven Generations Child and Family Services Program in Los Angeles where she had responsibility for its Mental Health Program, its CalWorks Program, and its state-funded domestic violence/sexual assault program. She created a “systems of care approach” to service delivery by organizing and managing a partnership between the American Indian Unit of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, the Southern California Indian Center, and Seven Generations.

Before that, Ms. Manness served for three years as the Community Development Specialist with the National Indian Child Welfare Association in Portland Oregon. In this capacity, she assisted Indian tribes and organizations throughout the country set up mental health systems of care for children and families, provided training on mental health topics through 2-5 day training institutes, and established and coordinated activities of a national American Indian family organization.

Prior to this, Ms. Manness served for six years as the Director of Behavioral Health Services at the Feather River Tribal Health Agency, a multi-million dollar health consortium that serves three tribes in northern rural California. In this capacity, she provided direct services as well as developed new services and training programs and new funding sources. She also organized and provided consultation to a large consortium of non-Indian and Indian agencies and service providers in Butte County to address child, spousal and elder abuse and Indian child welfare compliance issues.

Ms. Manness also served for twelve years as the Manager of the American Indian Counseling Center with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. In addition to delivering direct services, she was one of the primary designers and, later, administrators of an integrated and coordinated American Indian Mental Health Program in Los Angeles County. In 1991, the Counseling Center won the national NACO award for the most outstanding innovative, county mental health program.

Ms. Manness has served on the National Native American Advisory Group to the Center of Mental Health Services (SAMHSA), the National Indian Child Welfare Associations Board of Directors, the California State Violence Against Women Act Task Force, the State of California Native American Juvenile Justice Working Group, the California American Indian Advisory Task Force on Social Services, the California Coalition on Indian Child Welfare, the LA County Native American Indian Commission, and the Minority Task Force of San Gabriel Valley.

Ms. Manness graduated Phi Beta Kappa and received her BA in Psychology from UCLA. She earned her Masters Degree in Social Work from the UCLA School of Social Welfare. She is a licensed Psychiatric Social Worker and is a trained family mediator.

Jon R. Townsend, M.A. (Creek) is a Senior Training Associate with Indian Dispute Resolution Services, Inc. Mr. Townsend has played a central role, since IDRS' inception, in designing and delivering the IDRS training program in cross-cultural communication, negotiation and mediation/peacemaking. He has led the IDRS Training Team in over two hundred and fifty engagements throughout the United States. In the course of this extensive involvement, Mr. Townsend has inspired and trained numerous trainers who have apprenticed with him.

Mr. Townsend has worked as a certified professional mediator for over twenty-seven years. He has a thriving private practice in the Pacific Northwest, and has successfully mediated literally hundreds of disputes. In January 2000, Mr. Townsend received the “Mediator of the Decade Award” from Indian Dispute Resolution Services in a ceremony commemorating its Tenth Anniversary.

Mr. Townsend is nationally known as an effective, personal, and innovative trainer in mediation and negotiation with a specialization in cross-cultural communication, negotiation, and work-place diversity issues. He has taught dispute resolution throughout the United States and abroad, both in the public and private sectors. Mr. Townsend's clients include the U.S. Postal Service, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, a host of state agencies, and the governments of Russia, Poland, Australia, Costa Rica, Honduras, Cuba, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. During the past four years, Mr. Townsend has provided negotiation training and coaching to labor union and management negotiation teams prior to and after contract bargaining in over fifteen different hospitals in the Pacific Northwest.

Mr. Townsend has a MA Degree in Psychology and has taught courses in conflict resolution and cross-cultural communication in formal academic settings as well, including Antioch University (Seattle), Washington State University (Spokane), Portland State University (Portland), Lewis and Clark (Portland), Willamette (Salem) and Concordia College (Portland). He is a member of the Adjunct Faculty at the USA/Russian Institute of Conflictology, and of the Adjunct Faculty at Sonoma State University, D-Q University, and Humboldt State University in California.