40-hour Mediation Training
Note new dates:
October 5-9, 2026
Location: East Bay Area
About this Training
Become a Certified Mediator through our 40-Hour, hands-on certification-level training. Learn how to confidently navigate conflict and guide others toward resolution. In SEEDS’ 40-Hour Mediation and Conflict Resolution Training, you’ll gain practical, hands-on skills to mediate disputes in workplaces, families, schools, and communities. Participants will gain insights and strategies for opening communication, guiding people through difficult conversations, and being trauma-informed. Whether you're building a new career or strengthening your leadership toolkit, this training prepares you to facilitate difficult conversations with clarity, empathy, and structure. This training will jumpstart your mediation practice, and provide ideas and leads for gaining further experience in the field. You’ll leave with a strong foundation in mediation and clear next steps to continue building your mediation practice with confidence.
Content of the Training
-
Communication Skills: Build powerful communication skills that help people feel heard, reduce tension, and move conversations forward. We focus on active listening, engaging with empathy, asking effective, open-ended questions, reflecting back, checking assumptions, identifying possible solutions.
-
Conflict Styles: Recognize different conflict styles—including your own—and learn how to work effectively across differences.
-
Conflict Cycles: Learn what drives people into conflicts and impasse situations, and how to move them through difficult conversations to resolution.
-
Trauma-informed: Develop a trauma-informed approach to mediation, with tools to navigate power dynamics, identity, and lived experience with care and awareness. The training provides opportunities to better understand your own positionality and how it impacts your approaches to mediation; analysis of the impact that trauma and other impacts based on race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, education etc. have on how conflicts play out, and mediation strategies.
-
Mediation Skills: Fostering multi-partiality and respect, identifying and framing issues, facilitating communication and negotiation, dealing with power dynamics, biases, feelings, and assumptions.
-
Model of Mediation: SEEDS Co-Mediation model, along with discussion of a variety of mediation models, fields, and starting your business.
-
Extensive Hands-On Practice: Participate in guided role plays and small-group mediation sessions with real-time coaching.
This training features 40 hours of in classroom training participation. Certificates will reflect the number of hours completed.
Tuition and Financial Aid
Price: $1495*. Includes 40 hours of live, interacting training, coaching sessions and roleplaying.
*We will be accepting financial aid applications!
Have questions? See our FAQs or email info@seedscrc.org for additional inquiries.
About the Facilitators
Certified in Workplace Mediation
Mediation for Communities and Families
Everyday Mediation
Jonathan Bradley is a mediator and a restorative justice consultant. He has organized, coordinated and facilitated restorative justice/practices and conflict resolution training throughout the San Francisco Bay area, nationally and internationally, and widely throughout various U.S school systems, universities, and public service efforts.
Workplace Mediation
Mediation for Communities and Families
Julie Shackford-Bradley brings her extensive experience providing RJ services and trainings in workplaces and higher education. Over the years, she has met the needs of clients by developing frameworks and structures for expanding psych safety, improving communication, especially around feedback, and providing restorative responses for conflict and harm.
Senior Trainer in Mediation
Experienced Mediator and Arbitrator in all areas
Mattie Robertson is a dispute resolution professional who has mediated hundreds of cases, and is certified as a mediator, facilitator, and arbitrator. She was Deputy Director of the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution (CNDR) at UC Law San Francisco, Program Director for the Arts Arbitration and Mediation Services (AAMS) at California Lawyers for the arts, and currently teaches the Mediation Clinic at UC Law SF supervising student working as mediators in local agencies and courts.
Transformative Mediation in Schools
Workplace Mediation
Community Mediation
David Yusem is a leader in the field of restorative justice and conflict transformation with 25 years of experience. I am currently the Restorative Justice Coordinator for the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) and have played a pivotal role in transforming school discipline practices over the past decade plus.
Mediation for Business, Contracts
Families, Communities, Real Estate, Small Claims
Najwa Sabrie is an experienced mediator,who started her career in 2015, and went on to resolve numerous cases in various fields, some of which include: business disputes, contract disputes, divorce and child custody disputes, employer/employee disputes, landlord-tenant disputes, neighbor disputes, probate and will disputes, property damage disputes, real estate disputes, small claims, and workplace disputes.
Labor Mediation
Civil Rights / Discrimination Mediation
Yu-Yee Wu has over ten years of experience in this field, and has extensive experience in workplace mediation. Prior to joining CRD as an Attorney Mediator in 2018, Yu-Yee Wu was a member of the State Mediation and Conciliation Service (SMCS) of the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) where for seven years she mediated public sector collective bargaining disputes statewide, including for cities, counties, safety officers, bus drivers, teachers and schools.
Some notes about the mediation training:
-
Introductory mediation trainings feature content and discussion regarding race, power dynamics, and privilege in society.
-
People attending these trainings will have different life experiences, traumas, and levels of knowledge around the various issues raised in the training.
-
We will collectively create community agreements to ensure that people exercise patience with one another, and maintain high levels of awareness of how our words and behaviors may impact others.
-
Please come prepared to engage in difficult topics, and to take care of yourself as you need for your own wellbeing.
Training Cancellation Policy:
If you cancel 28 days (4 weeks) or more before the training, your fee will be refunded, minus a $25 processing fee. If you cancel 14- 27 days before training, 50% of your fee will be refunded. If you cancel within 2 weeks (1-13 days), there is no refund; however, you can offer your spot to someone else within your network. If you cancel once the training begins, there is no refund or credit voucher. Exceptions may be made in case of emergencies - contact the office for more details. SEEDS cannot offer transfers to another training at the participant request.
Training Absence Policy:
In order to complete the 40-hour certification for Mediation, you may not take any time of absence during the training to fulfill the requirements for a 40-hour certificate. In the event of a personal emergency or unplanned absence, your certificate will reflect the number of hours successfully completed. We do not have availability to make up missed time.