Make Divorce Healthier (MDH)

Make Divorce Healthier is a PA based community all about bringing together passionate professionals who have the courage and commitment to re-envision what divorce can be for our clients.

VISION STATEMENT:   

A culture where the practice of divorce promotes fairness, dignity, and cooperation, and is no longer considered alternative dispute resolution, but the norm.  

MISSION STATEMENT:

Quite simply, our mission is to Make Divorce Healthier.

MDH is a grassroots movement that aims to shift the destructive win/lose orientation of the traditional, adversarial divorce process to one of preserving family relationships and securing financial futures so that couples in conflict can restructure their lives in a healthy way.

We do this by:

• offering interdisciplinary forums for professionals to gain advanced knowledge of legal, financial, emotional and parenting issues surrounding divorce.
• building an inclusive, engaged community of high-integrity and compassionate professionals.
• creating consistent, unified messaging and educational content for the public around healthy divorce.
• supporting and nurturing academic research, case studies, as well as innovative, entrepreneurial ideas and practices that aim to achieve this goal.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Guiding principles and best practices for all divorce professionals:

• Full and fair disclosure.
• Build trust and communication.
• Honoring ability and desire of spouses to make their own decisions.
• Men and women deserve equal treatment under the law.
• Fairness can be achieved in many ways and viewed from many perspectives.
• Comprehensive divorce without court, including mediation, collaborative and do-it-yourself whenever possible, and builds bridges between options.
• Focused on preserving family relationships and financial futures over win-lose and revenge-seeking tactics.
• Builds on parents’ strengths and inherent ability to know what's best for their children.
• Supports that educate and empower the individual to engage in problem-solving
• Supports that correct power imbalances between spouses
• Provides regular accurate educational information to the public around these principles and practices.
• Keeps costs down for the client whenever possible
• Cross-training of divorce practitioners to build compassion and interdisciplinary knowledge
• Creates diverse, vetted networks and referral sources for real-time help around emotional, parenting, legal and financial challenges
• Uses technology to keep costs down and streamline processes for clients
• Uses technology that encourages balance collaboration and confidentiality among clients and professionals
• Transparency about costs of divorce
• Encouraging people to be their best selves while engaging in the process
• Step-by-step guidance and facilitation of a family-centered approach
• Divorce as an honorable and rewarding business and an industry to be proud of
• Litigation as a last resort
• Recognizing that all of the professionals who work with divorcing clients have a role to play in making divorce healthier

Practices that are not promoted or tolerated:

• churning billable hours and unnecessary filings
• separation tactics that alienate parents
• adversarial tactics that create or further distrust
• shaming tactics that make parents look like bad parents
• playing into revenge tactics designed to win at all costs
• making unrealistic promises and guarantees of justice in the court system