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 is a Mediator and Associate Trainer with Cascade Alternative Resolution Services ( Portland, Ore.) and with Conflict Resolution Institute--CRI ( Tacoma, WA), an Associate Mediator with the Center for Resolution of Environmental Disputes ( Arcada, CA), an Adjunct Professor in Dispute Resolution at D-Q University ( Davis, CA), and Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College ( Cloquet, Minn). He is a past Board Member of the California Dispute Resolution Council.

Since 1980, Dr. Haberfeld has maintained a private mediation practice specializing in resolving business, community, labor-management, and public policy disputes. He has extensive experience

training and resolving disputes between labor and management in over fifteen different public and private hospitals. 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.