Valenti a pro bono attorney without borders

Over the last two decades, Thomas P. Valenti has put his arbitration and mediation skills to use across the globe, traveling to places like Greece and India, and now helping young people in Afghanistan via online mentoring.

Valenti is a Chicago-based dispute resolution specialist who has held a law license since 1977. He first worked as a trial attorney, primarily in Cook County, then over the last two decades shifted his focus to mediation and arbitration in civil, commercial, interpersonal and workplace matters.

Valenti’s resume is extensive. Among other positions, he has served as a neutral arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association National Roster, and as a member of the CPR panel of Distinguished Neutrals and the Center for Arbitration and Mediation of the Chamber of Commerce Brazil-Canada. He is also an adjunct instructor of mediation skills at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies.

Arbitration and mediation require different skills, Valenti says.

“To be an effective mediator you need to be a better listener than a talker,” he explains. “You have to make sure people get their story out, and make sure the person they are in conflict with hears their story.”

Arbitration, on the other hand, is akin to being a judge, he says. “You have to be a good manager of the process,” he says. “You have to make sure people get their cases and the evidence they want in an efficient way, and you have to have knowledge of the rules of evidence, because we make lots of different rulings during cases, which can go weeks at a time.”

Born and raised in the Northwest Side of Chicago, Valenti graduated from Loyola Academy in suburban Wilmette and studied political science and economics at Boston College before earning a law degree from DePaul University in Chicago.

Valenti’s grandfather was born in Sicily and immigrated through Ellis Island, eventually settling in Chicago and starting a plastering business.

His family has a strong attachment to Italy, Valenti says. One of his sons got married there about a year ago, and all three of his children speak Italian. Their mother’s family is also from Italy.

After traveling to Italy for pleasure, Valenti’s first volunteer trip to Italy was in the late 1990s through the nonprofit Global Volunteers, which provided English teachers in Ostuni, in the Puglia region. He has since gone back numerous times. “That’s my second home,” he says.

Valenti has volunteered as a mediator through a variety of initiatives, originally with Mediators Beyond Borders, an organization he was involved with at its inception.

He was a part of mediation teams that went to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, and to Greece in 2012, when the country grappled with a migration crisis.

“We learned that if you got people to tell their stories, often that was the best vehicle to create understanding,” he says.

Nowadays, in addition to volunteering as a child advocate for the Young Center for Immigrant Children, Valenti’s volunteer involvement flows from his founding of the Global Youth Development Initiative, which pairs professionals with young mentees in other countries.

The GYDI was created by two young Afghani women who Valenti met in India in 2016, during a mentoring trip for visiting students from Afghanistan. Following that trip, the two young women started Global Youth Development Initiative, an online cross-cultural mentoring program targeting students primarily in conflict-ridden countries.

The fall of the Afghani government to the Taliban in 2021 was a terrible time for his mentees, and a difficult one for him as well, albeit long-distance, he says. To protect the students from suffering the consequences of being affiliated with an international initiative, the GYDI website has gone dormant, and members now keep in touch via a private Facebook group, he says. In late 2021, he launched a program to teach English to women and girls who no longer have access to education, a program he continues to work on.

“I still teach quietly a couple of times a week,” he says. “That also developed into another group (of mentors) who help them apply to college: edit essays, teach how to use applications and how to do interviews.”

Describing himself as a life-long learner, Valenti says his volunteer work taught him about the resilience of young people in other countries.

“In Afghanistan, they fight to go to school, and here people, if anything, don’t want to go to school,” he says. “The deprivation of rights in some countries makes some young people into really strong people. I am not sure our young people (in the United States) really know how difficult life can be. You get to meet people who make you realize really how lucky we are here.”