Who's Making Divorce Healthier: Meet Katrina Volker

​What is your business and where is it?
The OurFamilyWizard website is an online communication tool for divorced or separated parents. OFW’s headquarters is located in Minneapolis, MN, but the website is used by parents and family law professionals worldwide. My role is to educate judges, lawyers, and other professionals about OFW through presentations and panel discussions.

How does the OurFamilyWizard website make divorce healthier?
The OurFamilyWizard website and its mobile applications offer a variety of tools that help parents communicate and manage all parts of their parenting plan.

Using the website, both parents in a family have equal access to features including a shared parenting time calendar, expense and payment log, family information bank, and much more. Templates built into each feature cue parents to create entries with complete details and make them immediately available to the other parent. Parents are better able to get straight to the facts without the frivolous conflict or confusion that often accompanies other methods of communication such as email or texting. OFW has proven to be so effective at helping parents to moderate conflict that family law judges routinely order its use in contested cases across the entire United States and 5 Canadian provinces. 

When co-parent communication is documented and in one location, the work of family law and mental health professionals becomes much easier. Attorneys, guardian-ad-litems, parent coordinators, and others appointed to a case are granted full access to oversee client activity and work directly with parents on the website. Instead of combing through dozens of email cc's from clients, one free professional account will give you all the access you need to get a clear view of what's going on with any family you work with. Professional users can also retrieve court-admissible records from their account. 

Most importantly, OFW helps to protect children from conflict. When a child picks up a parent's phone only to read an upsetting text from their other parent, or when kids are used as a messenger for their parents who simply won't speak to each other, they are forced into the middle of their parents' conflict. The OurFamilyWizard website creates a private and secure space for parents to contain their communication so that the kids remain shielded from any arguments. Moreover, the website can help put an end to conflict by encouraging parents to communicate in a manner that is more concise and efficient. It does so by getting parents to use tools that are alternative to traditional messaging. While the website does provide parents with messaging space, nearly all of the logistics can be worked out using the shared calendar, expense log and information bank.  

The OurFamilyWizard website makes divorce healthier by improving parents' odds of resolving conflicts on their own through the use of this highly-structured, neutral communication tool. When parents are able to spend less time litigating disputes, they are both able to spend more time focused on their children.

---


Are you a changemaker?

The future of divorce is now in session. Join us on November 15th as we embark together at Make Divorce Healthier Symposium.
​

Register now

---

​Katrina has been a professional liaison for the OurFamilyWizard® website for five years. Her role includes educating Judges, lawyers, and other family law professionals on the online tools that can be utilized to benefit and monitor the parental communication process in high conflict cases.               
 
Recent speaking engagements include the Ontario Court of Justice, West LegalEdcenter, AFCC Annual Conference, Miami-Dade County Bar and Bench, and Tacoma County Bar and Bench.
 
She graduated Cum Lade from the College of St. Catherine receiving a BS in Entrepreneurship and Marketing/Management. She earned her MAOL with an emphasis in Strategic Management from St. Catherine University. 

---