Focusing on the Sustainable Development Goals. Member Spotlight: David Kay
David Kay is a Senior Extension Associate and Outreach faculty member at Cornell University, USA. His applied research and outreach program at the Community and Regional Development Institute works with community leaders and others in communities to help them make informed decisions on issues of concern to them. Cornell University is a uniquely combined private and public (“land grant”) university. This is important as the land grant’s public service mission informs the kind of outreach he does.
Transformative Mediation
David has a background in economics and local government. After graduate school, he worked with Cornell’s Local Government Program on a variety of topics including environment, waste management, land use and development, budget questions, zoning, and smart growth. “All of those kinds of things involve people with different opinions having to come together and, through a variety of different mechanisms, make decisions about how to move forward as a community. And often involve multiple communities.” David is interested in how people and groups make decisions. He started working with mediators in the dispute resolution community in the 1990s. He was intrigued by how their skills applied to community decision making contexts could benefit his work with multiparty and multi-community level conflicts. He also worked at the Peace Studies Program at Cornell University and was active in the US peace movement of the 1980s.
In addition to working at the university, David is an experienced transformative mediation practitioner at a community Center. He likes the way transformative mediation acknowledges that “Conflict arises not exclusively, but to a large degree out of distorted communications…”. “Transformative mediation centers the goals of empowerment and recognition in interpersonal relations,” he explains. The role of the mediator is to “Support conversations that people are otherwise unable to have. Our goal is to support the conversation with different techniques to create a context in which people feel empowered to express themselves fully, and to feel strong enough to acknowledge others.” He adds, “When people are under stress, angry, hurt, or feel like they are misunderstood, they tend to go to a place of weakness instead of strength”. David mostly works on two-party mediations related to custody cases, landlord and tenant, and other forms of community mediation. Previously he worked with a sister service that focused on organizational and municipal mediation.
Sustainable Development
David highly values social mission, and that is what attracted him to MBBI. “The idea of building the capacity of community members to handle conflicts more constructively,” is what first caught his attention. David is a contributor to the MBBI Climate Change Policy Project (CCPP) and UN Working Group where they work on issues pertinent to the Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG16).
David is interested in making connections between sustainable development, MBBI, and the Global Development Department in which he now works at Cornell. His work currently focuses on community economic issues, transitioning from fossil to renewable fuels, and individual and community responses to climate risk, especially flooding. He collaborates regularly in this work with other academics and with off-campus organizational and community partners.
Article by Kylea Shropshire, MBBI Writer