Queer Mediation Cooperative
The Queer Mediation Cooperative (QMC) serves organizations, families, kinship networks, and communities seeking conflict mediation services. We specialize in supporting LGBTQIA+ clients and folks in non-traditional dynamics to come together and move through conflict.
We practice facilitated mediation on the premise of radical self-determination: we hold responsibility for the process, but it is up to our clients to choose to show up, listen, and negotiate what works for everyone involved.
QMC is based in New York City and provides mediation services worldwide on Zoom. Our Coop consists of three mediators, Jasmin Banaei, Ariel Goldberg, and Diego Barnes. We met in 2025 at the New York Peace Institute’s Advanced Divorce Mediation training and continued to train together with the New York State Council for Divorce Mediation. QMC brings together our range of professional experiences in human resources, mental health counseling, art, education, and community organizing.
Our Team
Ariel Goldberg
Ariel Goldberg is a writer, curator, and educator devoted to trans and queer lineages and intergenerational dialog. Goldberg has created exhibitions and public programs for over fifteen years at venues including Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the Magnum Foundation, and the Poetry Project. They have taught photography, writing, and contemporary art practices independently and at Bard College, The New School, New York University, Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, and Rutgers University. In addition to working as a conflict mediator, Goldberg is a proud member of Academics Come Together-United Auto Workers (ACT-UAW) 7902 and Jewish Voice for Peace.
(they/them)
Diego Barnes Marsh
Diego Barnes is a DIY queer community organizer, restorative circle facilitator, conceptual artist and experience designer. He has a B.A. from Bard College where he focused on relational aesthetics and making art that moves people to think about the ways we connect (and don’t). Since then his career has spanned leading community circles about big unwieldy topics, like abortion stigma and money, programming thought leadership at global advertising conferences and fostering human connection through meaningful event design in spaces ranging from corporate offices to off-the-grid anarchist communes. These days he is focused on bringing people together across difference by demystifying conflict, facilitating challenging moments and welcoming joy in collaboration even when it seems farfetched.
(all pronouns)
Jasmin Banaei
Based in Brooklyn and from all over, Jasmin Banaei brings 15 years of experience facilitating group healing directly with LGBTQ+ peoples, youth, organizers, incarcerated peoples, asylum seekers, and workers. Weaving together somatic modalities, conflict transformation practices, and their counselor education (M.Ed. Counseling Psychology) for their offerings, they carefully craft impactful program strategy toward building relational culture and capacity. Jasmin is always thinking about / feeling out / practicing-to-embody what it means to live with integrity, invite spirituality, build community, and cultivate relational culture to skill-up movement builders with the hope of another world.
(they/them)
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