OM17: Danica Joan | Creating the Future by Restoring Families Mastery Unleashed

Meet Today's Guest: Danica Joan
Danica Joan joins us to share her commitment to restoring families experiencing high conflict custody matters. As a family advocate of over 20 years, Danica created the non profit, Kids Need Both, Inc as a way of educating parents and professionals on how to create positive change in high conflict families that gives the children a whole new future. It has been through her own heartache that she found her voice as a family advocate and now makes it her life mission to help others. Life's struggles that start may be your opportunity to step into your life's calling. With over 20 years’ experience as an educator, Danica provides families with workable solutions to their custody conflicts. She is a Certified Family Mediator with Florida Supreme Court, Guardian Ad Litem, the author for Florida’s Family Stabilization Parent Education curriculum and a personal custody coach.
Tell the audience a little bit about your story.
It was my friend, Donna Eller, that introduced us and she says this could be something that would be a great place to connect. And it's been a really great opportunity to be able to, to be a contributing author in this book, because it's not, even though I knew my story, I had the basis of my story. It was actually through the writing process that I discovered so many things I didn't see before and 20 years ago was when I kind of, my journey ended up choosing its course in working with families going through high conflict custody situations, because that was where my journey started. I was going through, I ended up in a marriage that was not healthy. It was very, it was dysfunctional, and there were children involved. So, it wasn't just the decisions I made were not just for me, but it was also for my children. And yet I chose to in the marriage, thinking it was going to go one way and it didn't. And I realized I found myself in a very high conflict custody situation. So, you know, just sort of going through survival and trying to make the most of the situation. I realized, well wait a minute. This is not a calling I asked for, but it was kind of thrust upon me to help other families, other parents who were going through high conflict custody situations. So, over the course of the years, I created a nonprofit called kids need both. And its mission is to educate those who are dealing with high conflict families, not just the parents themselves. But I also found in my journey that the professionals were not very well equipped to deal with effectively deal with these high conflict families. So that's what I do today is I work with, I'm a mediator. I'm an author of the family stabilization curriculum. And I coach families who are going through divorce.
I love what you guys are and what you're doing with your nonprofit. I want you to be able to share a little bit more about that.
I was talking to a friend of mine, who's one of the founders of a divorce professionals like organization nationwide, and her and I were sharing, she says, you know, the legal field doesn't get a bad reputation for no reason, as far as you know, the legal process being dragged out, and it costing people 10s of 1000s of dollars and all that, and I've got to believe that there are good people in those in all of those fields, but there's a lot of resignation in that situation. So, you know, the thing is, is divorce has three ways to go, it can go mediation centered, it could go like collaborative, or it could go litigated, and ultimately, mediation is where the most harmonious wants, collaborative is the next stage and of course litigated is if somehow there can be an establishment of trying to filter out those families So we're not pushing everybody into the presumed litigated direction. It would make a big difference for families and that's what I do with my team, with kids need both is to create options for families and actually empower the parents because the parents need to be in the driver's seat