Member

Courtney Chicvak, Esq., M.S., J.D., is a peacebuilder, educator, and advocate for access to justice, guided by empathy, service, and a vision of communities flourishing in dignity and peace. She serves as Program Director of Alternative Dispute Resolution at the Long Island Dispute Resolution Centers (LIDRC), a program of EAC Network and the state-designated Community Dispute Resolution Centers for Suffolk and Nassau Counties in New York. In this role, she helps lead the design and delivery of both court-annexed and community-based mediation programs in partnership with the New York State Unified Court System. She also oversees LIDRC’s Basic and Advanced Mediation Training Programs, nurturing emerging practitioners with care and clarity while building scalable, sustainable frameworks for peace across Long Island’s court and community systems.

At the heart of her leadership is the belief that dignity and understanding belong to every individual, regardless of their circumstances. Courtney works alongside more than 60 mediators, arbitrators, and apprentices who serve in family, civil, and small claims courts, including those in the Suffolk County Family Court Mediation Program, as well as in special education, community mediation, lemon law arbitration, and public accommodation matters. She also helps oversee LIDRC’s AmeriCorps mediation initiative and supports the design and success of grant-funded programs that expand access to justice for families and communities across Long Island. With a strong foundation in nonprofit leadership, Courtney plays a key role in advancing program sustainability, cultivating philanthropic partnerships, and stewarding the resources that sustain court-annexed mediation systems and community resilience. Through her nonprofit leadership and volunteerism, she advocates with both heart and strategy to ensure that courts remain spaces of access, peace, and care for every community.

A peacemaker grounded in empathy and service, Courtney is an IMI Certified Mediator, a New York State Part 146 Basic Mediation Trainer, an ICF Associate Certified Coach, and a Senior Family Mediator with the Academy of Professional Family Mediators (APFM). She has supported hundreds of individuals and families through mediation in the New York State Unified Court System, and her work in co-parenting and family mediation has been deeply shaped by her service in the New York City Family Court and at the New York Peace Institute in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Earlier in her career, she served in labor and employee relations, navigating high-stakes workplace conflict at both a labor union and on the executive escalations team at Amazon.

Through her teaching and coaching, Courtney helps shape the next generation of legal and mediation leaders—cultivating ethical, emotionally intelligent, and impact-driven changemakers. She shares her knowledge and experience in negotiation, mediation, and conflict resolution at Columbia University (including the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Teachers College and the launch of the Conflict Intelligence Lab), UC Law San Francisco, Yale School of Management, Stanford Law School, Hitotsubashi University, and the Women in Negotiation (WIN) Summit.

She has shared her work and connected with colleagues internationally in more than eight countries—including Kazakhstan, Japan, Austria, India, and Switzerland—nationally at the American Bar Association (ABA), American Association of Law Schools (AALS), and New York State Bar Association (NYSBA), and regionally at the Association for Conflict Resolution of Greater New York (ACR-GNY) and New York State Dispute Resolution Association (NYSDRA) annual conferences. Her insights on co-parenting and ADR have been featured in Newsweek, Parents Magazine, Lawline, the Suffolk County Bar Association Law Journal, and the New York State Dispute Resolution Lawyer Journal.

She serves on the Board of Directors for the National Association for Community Mediation (NAFCM), co-chairs committees with the New York State and Suffolk County Bar Associations, and mentors future attorneys through the Alumnae Leadership Council at St. John’s University School of Law. She was appointed to the U.S. Department of State’s Fulbright Specialist Roster and honored as a 2024 Long Island Business News Leader in Law. Her recent work explores the intersection of artificial intelligence, culture, art, and community mediation as tools to foster sustainable peace and healing—locally and globally.

Courtney holds a B.S. from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, an M.S. from Columbia University’s Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Program, and a J.D. from St. John’s University School of Law, and she is admitted to practice law in New York.  She is devoted to uplifting others, cultivating peace, and expanding access to justice—so that communities may flourish in dignity, understanding, and harmony.