Melissa Reinberg grew up in Dallas, Texas. Her background includes work as a poverty lawyer, law professor, community mediator, and teacher, all of which have given her a unique perspective from which to develop and lead Negotiation Works. Melissa received an AB from Cornell University and a JD from Harvard Law School. 

After law school, Melissa served as a Prettyman Fellow at Georgetown Law, where she represented clients in juvenile delinquency and adult criminal cases and earned an LL.M in Advocacy. She then worked as a civil legal services lawyer, first as a staff attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services Program and then as the Legal Director for the Legal Aid Society of DC, where she represented clients in family, landlord-tenant, and public benefits cases. For 17 years, Melissa taught a simulation-based Negotiation and Mediation seminar as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center. And since 2002, Melissa has served as a mediator in a wide variety of legal disputes, including criminal cases and civilian police complaints through the Center for Dispute Settlement, and family, small claims, and truancy cases as a community mediator with DC Superior Court’s Multi-Door Dispute Resolution Division. 

In 2017, Melissa began volunteering at Calvary Women’s Services, a transitional housing program in the Anacostia neighborhood of D.C., teaching an 8-week Negotiation Strategies program she designed specifically for the Calvary residents. The women’s reactions to the classes were compelling: as they struggled with homelessness, addiction, and mental health issues, they also reported that they found immediate applications of the negotiation strategies to their lives, such as when weighing job offers, addressing roommate issues, or making overtures to estranged family members. Melissa, feeling privileged to be a witness to the women’s restored sense of dignity, control, and productivity, taught the negotiations course several times as a volunteer and then decided to test the waters to see if individuals from other marginalized communities in the Washington, DC area would also benefit from these critical skills. From there, Negotiation Works was born.

Together with volunteer co-instructors, Melissa has led Negotiation Works’ multi-week Negotiation Strategies programs at Calvary Women’s Services, Reach Up, Georgetown University’s Pivot Program, Together We Bake, the District Alliance for Safe Housing, My Sister’s Place, Southeast Ministry, Community Family Life Services, Friends of Guest House, and the D.C. Jail.

To Melissa, the present time seems like the right moment to spread these programs throughout our society; the economic, social, and health disruptions of the pandemic add more uncertainties and pressures to individuals who are already struggling to maintain stability, and the most recent racial justice movement has created momentum for meaningful societal change. What does that momentum look like on a day-to-day basis at Negotiation Works? When class participants share their stories of how they used negotiation strategies to achieve positive outcomes in their own lives, Melissa feels a bit more confident that together, we can overcome adversity, resolve many of our differences, self-advocate to gain what we need, and — most important — build a stronger, more resilient society.