Community mediation centers renewing the civic mission for the twenty first century

Community Mediation Centers: Renewing the Civic Mission for the Twenty-First Century Raymond Shonhol tz Community mediation centers enter the twenty-first century with the opportunity to reafirm their civic domain and expand their social justice mission.

This article summarizes the early political foundation of the movement to establish community mediation centers, arguesfor continued social and political organizingfor the delivery of prevention and early mediation services, and encourages expanding the civic mission to include, along with conflict resolution, social change processes.

Since 1974, when I wrote the initial concept paper, ‘Community No-Fault Boards,� that launched the Community Board Program in San Francisco, the field of community mediation has grown, diversified, and matured. The communication, interactive, and conciliation skills and processes developed by community boards and similar neighborhood justice programs have filtered laterally into schools, social service agencies, nongovernment organizations, and formal justice processes. Neighborhood or community justice has been one of the fastest-growing social movements in the United States, with collateral impact in Ireland, Great Britain, parts of Western Europe, throughout Eastern Europe and many former republics of the Soviet Union, Latin America, Africa, and South Africa. In less than twenty-five years, an entire new field has developed dramatically globally, as illustrated by the Second International Conference on Conflict Resolution in Latin America, Fourth European Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution, Global Conference on Conflict Resolution in South Africa, and National Association for Community Mediation.

What is today taken for granted was perceived in the mid-1970s as a radical concept: the settlement of disputes by trained citizens in their own communities without any direct linkage to the formal civil or criminal justice system (Tomasic and Feeley, 1982; Schwerin, 1995).

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It is a community’s attention to civic work that enables it to build cohesion, learn new skills, develop new mechanisms, and sustain or restore civic responsibility and social modeling. Community mediation is the responsibility and civic work of neighborhoods in America, and the exercise of this responsibility serves to address conflicts early and simultaneously demonstrate the community’s social values.

Almost from the beginning, the community justice movement began to develop in two distinct directions or domains. In one domain, which I refer to here as justice centers, volunteers were sought, perhaps citywide, and trained to hear conflicts and disputes referred from more formal justice mechanisms: municipal and small claims courts, district attorney and city attorney offices, police departments, and various social service agencies.

Although the label often given to this domain was neighborhood justice center, most often the community or neighborhood component was represented by the volunteer service providers, and the actual cases were referred from institutional channels.

The justice center model serves as a diversionary channel for cases considered by justice and similar governmental institutions as more appropriate for informal, nonbinding, local dispute settlement mechanisms.

The importance, contribution, and relevancy of this domain notwithstanding, its primary impact has been twofold: to professionalize mediator services through recruitment, selection, and training of the service providers and to construct a relationship with justice agencies designed to decrease agency caseloads. The merits of this domain are not the subject of this article.

The second domain, which I here label community mediation centers, organized itself around a different perception of need and a different understanding of the opportunities provided through community-based conciliation mechanisms. This second domain saw mechanisms in the community as an opportunity to do the following: Address disputes before they entered the formal legal system.

Prevent and deescalate conflicts.

Use conciliatory mechanisms as a vehicle for addressing the relationship between disputing parties.

Strengthen the capacity of neighborhood, church, school, and social service organizations to address conflict effectively Strengthen the role of citizens in the exercise of their democratic responsibilities.

Use community support to recruit volunteers as diverse as the neighborhoods served and to solicit appropriate conflicts and issues.

Early articles on community mediation stressed these themes (Shonholtz, 1984a, 1984b, 1987).

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Community Mediation Centers These and similar other precepts launched community boards and motivated the community mediation movement throughout the United States. The first National Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution, held in 1981, brought together peace, church, and community mediation activists in the United States and Canada, who were drawn to a common new vision of community justice through conflict prevention and conciliation.

The following community organizing values were dominant: Conflict prevention Conflict reduction Citizen responsibility for prevention and early intervention Community responsibility to build prevention and early intervention mechanisms Democratic institution building and service delivery at the neighborhood level The early years of the Community Board Program and many community mediation centers within this domain reflected these political themes by insisting on the following basics: Disputes originate from the community rather than being diverted from institutional mechanisms.

Community mediation centers promote the recruitment of citizens for training.

Community mediation centers promote the service.

Conciliation models stress the ongoing relationship between the disputing parties as an integral part of the service.

Conciliation panels should be composed of at least three trained citizens living in the area where the dispute arose and reflecting the diversity of that neighborhood.

Training should be promoted on a mass scale to bring conflict resolution and management skills into neighborhoods, churches, and schools Local democracy building was at the heart of the community conciliation initiative, and community organizations, social clubs, churches, and schools became the source for the center’s cases and volunteers (Shonholtz, 1987). By the early 1980s the contours of a new system of community service and expertise could be seen in the nearly all-volunteer nature of the delivery of community mediation services (Shonholtz, 1988).

Moreover, the relationship between conflict reduction and community activism became more apparent. When citizens become builders and sustainers of community cohesion, they work to improve the quality of their own lives

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and the communities they serve. A community’s ability to reduce or prevent conflict and manage it reflects social cohesion and pervasive normative values. Concomitantly, the building of prevention mechanisms and skills within a community strengthens civic roots and promotes social cohesion. There is a direct relationship between community cohesion and the reduction of local violence and crime. In 1982, James Q. Wilson made a similar point concerning crime reduction in his famous Atlantic Monthly article, “Broken Windows.”

A community attending to social infractions is more likely to have a reduced crime rate than one that allows abandoned cars to be cannibalized, broken wmdows left unrepaired, and youth to live without employment or social and recreational outlets.

Political and Democratic Foundation of Community Mediation The prevention, settlement, and deescalation of conflict are components of any political system. The early settlement of conflict and the eschewing of courts in the early religion-based colonies are quintessentially American (Auerbach, 1983). Seeking to avoid the constraints of a religious community, the early American political theorists and founders placed conflict prevention and deescalation within the civic domain of the American political system. Contemporary community mediation reasserts and affirms a civic responsibility and opportunity to prevent and manage conflict, without the norm-enforcing judgments associated with the early religion-based American colonies (Auerbach, 1983).

Arguably, the prevention of conflict is a civic function and right included in the “rights reserved to the people” in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the U.S.Constitution. Governmental functions were viewed by the constitutional framers as activities separate from those exercised by an active and alert citizenry. Formal justice, prosecutors, courts, and law enforcement were governmental functions performed outside the civic domain.

These points are underscored because community justice is often regarded as something good or extra, or as an adjunct to justice functions, when in reality it is a critical component of the American political system. The restoration, rediscovery, or reassertion of these “civic rights” by community volunteer mediators is based on both historical precedent and an understanding of how the American political system was intended to function.

As designers of a government of limited responsibilities, the framers readily understood that their system depended on a civic domain that placed on the citizenry rights, responsibilities, and obligations, such as early prevention and intervention functions, which cannot be delegated. Either citizens and communities prevent conflict and its escalation, or they are forced to tolerate excessive behavior until it transforms itself into a violation of law.

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To prevent conflict or its escalation requires an early intervention mechanism based in the civic structure of the American community. In a democratic society, law enforcement and social services are provided only after the fact, that is, after the injury, crime, or need is fully documented and justified. It is only after a law has been alleged to be violated, an injury documented, or a social need established that police, courts, or social service agencies may intervene. From this perspective, nearly all formal institutional interventions are, by the constitutional manner in which their service is organized, after the fact and not prevention oriented. Conceptually prevention is difficult for law enforcement to impose in a democratic society. Historically and structurally, the responsibility lies in the civic domain.

The community mediation movement appropriately placed prevention and early intervention responsibilities on citizens and organizations within neighborhoods. Only citizens, operating without state authority, have the ability to offer assistance when they see a problem or promote a conciliatory service when no crime has yet been alleged. Precisely because they do not have state authority, citizens are free to intervene on behalf of willing parties. For community mediation centers, prevention and early intervention are two democratic functions inherent in the American political scheme.

To perform these functions requires communities to organize and citizens to develop their skills. This was the primary effort of the Community Board Program in its developmental years and of most community conciliation programs or services since then. The neighborhood and citizenry have the primary responsibility for prevention and early intervention; the municipality can assist by using its educational and outreach capacity to inform the citizenry at large of the availability of the prevention and dispute management services. As it does in its “911�educational effort, for example, a city government, better than any other unit in society, can affirm and consistently inform citizens of the value and availability of early intervention services. In its 1981legislative drafts to provide funds for community conciliation programs in California, the Community Board Program stressed that governmental policy favors prevention and reduction of conflict and encourages citizen efforts to strengthen neighborhoods.

In hindsight, the intersection of community mediation services and public policy has been difficult. Prevention and early intervention are hard to quantify, neighborhood residents are often not considered as professionals by the legal institutions, and court caseloads rarely decline with available community mediation services. Yet these are often the factors that shape the alternative dispute resolution legislation.

Community mediation services need a different form of municipal support. The community mediation service needs rhe educational arm of a municipality to communicate to citizens in conflict the availability of a neutral, professionally managed neighborhood settlement service. Municipalities need to understand better the importance of the mediation service and the civic

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responsibilities it performs in building local structures and processes that directly engage trained citizenry in the prevention, early intervention, and deescalation of conflict. Community mediation is an integral dimension of community building and reflects the capacity of communities in a democratic society to exercise early intervention effectively. The benefits of community mediation have been the subject of many books, articles, studies, and research (McGillis, 1997). Many programs need to articulate better the link between citizen initiative and responsibility and the effect of this work in strengthening local communities in order to secure governmental support, recognition, and funds.

In a democratic society, civil society is the great arena for addressing domestic, labor, social, educational, and other differences and conflicts in the first instance, prior to any violation of law. The capacity of the civil society to perform this task directly relates to the level of resources the service has to recruit, select, and train volunteers; undertake educational and outreach functions; and conduct proper case assessment and panel hearing management.

Although it cannot be the entity that prevents conflict or reduces tensions and hostilities prior to the violation of a law, the municipal government can and should be the promoter and funder of prevention-oriented community mediation services.

Renewing and Enriching the Civic Mission After nearly twenty-five years of experience, we can look at the early theoretical and organizational constructs of community mediation and make some new and revised assessments. We know that: Promoting effective communication between disputing parties can reduce their mutual level of tension and hostility.

Community-trained volunteers can be successful in introducing neighbors to a local dispute settlement program and drawing them into the process of conciliation.

Agreements made during conciliation sessions are, for the most part, sustained.

Churches, social clubs, local businesses, schools, and local offices of agencies can reduce domestic and group conflict through communication and conciliation processes.

Appreciating that community organizations are providers of prevention and early intervention services and recognizing the implications for civil society building, intergroup relations, and enhanced skill development that this holds, it is appropriate to reaffirm how to build and sustain such systems now and in the future. Terry Amsler (1988),in an informative review of trends in the community mediation field, concludes that “the determinative challenge for community mediation programs-at least those worthy of the name-may

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be their ability to directly receive and resolve disputes at the earliest levels, to successfully interact with the community and non-court organizations and agencies, and to make a difference in the life of the neighborhoods or areas they serve.”

In short, community mediation programs need to reaffirm their civic mission and political position as the primary promoter of prevention and early intervention services and to thwart the trend, often the by-product of legislation, to marginalize or reinvent their service as an appendix of the formal justice and agency systems. Success in this endeavor requires the political will to reaffirm the civic base of community mediation services and the enhancement of that service in some or all of the areas noted in the following discussion.

First, the community-organizing component of community mediation needs to be reaffirmed and implemented through means such as these: Formal organizing of neighborhoods as a dimension of the mediation service Base building with local entities, church groups, service providers, social clubs, schools, and local service arms of agencies Identification and referral of cases and volunteers Inclusion and participation of the municipality in an overall strategic plan for the provision of community prevention services Second, community mediation centers need to train local constituent groups that support the mediation service. Centers need to identify the needs of their local constituent groups and build appropriate training and mediating services within them. Constituent audiences might include the local Boys and Girls Clubs, youth employment services, gangs, juvenile probation and welfare departments, and drug prevention facilities. This approach is not only base building, but makes these organizations partners in the community mediation center’s mission to deescalate or prevent conflict. Further, such organizations broaden the political base of support for the center’s municipal agenda. Finally, the lateral extension of skills and services enriches the center’s learning about the needs and values of different organizations.

Third, community conflict resolution services need to be part of a more comprehensive social plan. Communities and municipalities need an integrated delivery of expertise, services, and training opportunities. Community mediation centers can take the lead in developing more comprehensive prevention and service delivery models that link schools and community organizations; local agency providers; and local police, welfare, and probation services.

Linking organizations and institutions within a comprehensive plan better uses resources and enables the mediation center to provide a broader range of services to communities and welfare and justice agencies (for example, the specific assignment of welfare dependency cases to special mediation panels or the referral of truancy and runaway cases from schools and juvenile probation to the center).

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Fourth, community mediation centers need to expand their capacity to address larger social and community issues. Community centers need LO strengthen their repertoire of professional services by offering conflict and change management training and services. Centers in the future, serving as neutral facilitators, could provide citizen participation, cooperative planning, and problem-solving processes to address complex, multiparty social and community change issues (such as school violence, drugs, and gang issues; integrated community, school, and police support programs; and urban transportation issues that affect neighborhoods).

Community centers provide an opportunity to recruit and train local community facilitators and to focus facilitators’attention on local issues that often reflect the ethnic, national minority, and religious needs of a city’s diverse population.

The field of citizen participation, cooperative planning, and public policy dialogues developed considerably in the 1990s. Emerging largely out of organizational development, political science, architecture, and psychology, these larger citizen processes fall generally within the domain of change management and offer a new field of intervention to community mediation centers. Community mediation centers can exercise an expanded responsibility to provide consensus-building methodologies to issues before they become conflictual and to bring those most vested in the subject into a cooperative planning process. Moving issues upstream before they flare up and addressing in a participatory manner the underlying needs of diverse parties or stakeholders enable community mediation centers to provide a new and vitally needed civic service. Centers in Florida, New Mexico, and North Carolina have elaborated their repertoire of expertise and provide collaborative processes to complex, multiparty issues.

The inclusion of change management expertise can develop a center’s ability to address more complex community issues, which may generate broader social and institutional support and, perhaps, new sources for funding for the center’s expanded service. Community mediation centers could convene, facilitate, and manage collaborative processes to achieve consensus outcomes on important local issues.

Partners for Democratic Change, an international change and conflict management organization, has established an American center, Partners-United States, dedicated to consensus processes. Partners-United States is designed to improve the capacity of community organizations to serve as community conveners for acute and chronic social and environmental justice issues and to increasing the number of people of color performing this civic work in their communities. This organization is now building this capacity in diverse organizations, including several community mediation centers, in twenty American cities.

Other national organizations can assist centers in building a new capacity that strengthens the mission of the organization, provides an opportunity to

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address issues in a collaborative manner, and moves the center more into the domain of change management. With an expanded capacity, community mediation centers can address conflict and change within their communities and enlarge the civic domain of their work.

Conclusion The politics of community mediation has moved beyond the tensions experienced in the formative period of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The need for diverse conflict management services by different sectors (civil society, governmental, and market) is apparent in the specialization witnessed by the field over the past ten to fifteen years. Nonetheless, to fulfill their civic function and be adequately funded to provide early intervention and change management services, community mediation centers need to: Reaffirm their civic and community organizing roots.

Laterally expand conflict resolution services to groups, organizations, and institutions.

Promote the development of comprehensive municipal prevention and service plans.

Expand their expertise to include the field of change management for broad social and community issues.

Assert with clarity and consistency their political and civic domain.

Given the tensions, changes, and interdependency that nearly all American communities have experienced, the new century requires the aggressive promotion of prevention and early intervention mechanisms and the greater participation of diverse groups in decision making at the local level in American society. This can be the expanded domain of community mediation centers, which in the future might be better described as community conflict and change management centers. This domain continues to hold the promise of early intervention and prevention of conflict and the facilitation of peaceful social change in American communities.

In the future, communities will call on mediating methodologies to address an increasing range of issues, disputes, and consensus-building needs (Shonholtz, 1997). It is time to rethink the democratic foundation ofcommunity mediation and envision a renewed civic culture to peacefully resolve conflict and manage change.

References Amsler, T. “Trends and Challenges in Community Mediation.� NIDR News, 1988, 1.

Auerbach, J. Justice Without Law? New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

McGilhs, D. Community Mediation Programs: Developments and Challenges. Bethesda, Md.: National Institute of Justice, 1997.

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Schwerin, E. Mediation, Citizen Empowerment, and Transformational Politics. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995.

Shonholtz, R. “Neighborhood Justice Systems: Work, Structure and Guiding Principles.”

Mediation Quarterly, 1984a, 5, 3-30.

Shonholtz, R. “NewJustice Theories and Practice.” In J. Bronfronte and others (eds.), Before the Law: An Introduction to Legal Process. (3rd ed.) Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1984b.

Shonholtz, R. “The Citizen’s Role in Justice.” In L. Curtis (ed.), The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1987.

Shonholtz, R. “Buildinga New Juvenile Justice Model Based on a Community Volunteer Service Delivery System.” Youth Policy, 1988, 10 (11).

Shonholtz, R. “The Mediating Future.” In R. Shonholtz and I. Shapiro (eds.), The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997.

Tomasic, R., and Feeley, M. NeighborhoodJustice. White Plains, N.Y.: Longman, 1982.

Wilson, J. Q., and Kelling, G. L. “BrokenWindows.”Atlantic Monthly, Mar., 1982,249 (31, 29-38.

Raymond Shonholtz is founder and president of Partners for Democratic Change, with eleven national centers on conflict and change management located in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the United States. H e alsofounded the Community Board Program and directed it for twelve years.