Conflict Resolution Education - National Criminal Justice Reference ...

Community Mediation Programs
Community mediation centers, located in more
than 600 communities in the United States, have
initiated the community-to-school link in developing
and implementing conflict resolution programs for
children, youth, and families. These centers, which
are typically nonprofit, community-based agencies,
use trained community volunteers to provide a wide
range of mediation services to youth and adults.
The majority of these centers have initiated mediation
and conflict resolution programs for youth in
schools and other settings. Mediation centers have
pioneered applications of mediation for youth and
families, including truancy, parent/child, gang, and
suspension mediation, as well as applications in
juvenile correctional settings. In addition, centers
have collaborated with other youth-serving agencies
and schools in the development of prevention and
intervention strategies and initiatives to prevent
youth violence.
Community mediation centers provide an institutional
base for long-term conflict resolution training
in the communities in which they are located. When
conflicts flow from the school to the community and
from the community to the school, the mediation
center provides the appropriate links and continuum
of services. The National Association for Community
Mediation, listed in appendix A, can provide
information about local services.
Lawyers Adopt-a-School Program
The Lawyers Adopt-a-School Program of the
American Bar Association, Section of Dispute Resolution,
encourages the establishment of mediation
programs in elementary, middle, and high schools.
A law firm becomes a sponsor of a school peer mediation
program by helping to provide training and
financial and moral support. The law firm works
with the school to develop and maintain a school
mediation program, to provide resources for the
initial training of the mediators and for continued
support of the program, to enrich the school by
involving the community and the business sector,
to provide role models, and to assist teachers in
developing ways to expand the curriculum. The
school and the law firm enter into an agreement
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that identifies the aims of the partnership, the activities
each partner will undertake, the resources to
be provided, and the length of time the partnership
will last. After an agreement is reached, the mutual
relationship is ongoing for the duration of the school
year.
East Cleveland Youth Services Mobile
Mediation Project
One of the purposes of this project is to address the
afterschool conflicts that tend to boil over into violence
on East Cleveland’s inner-city streets. Project
staff (parents, youth, teachers, and principals) who
travel the neighborhood in a mobile home are highly
visible and offer alternatives for settling fights between
volatile groups of youth. Staff are trained to
recognize signs of imminent conflict and to apply
the skills of mediation. The mobility of the project
makes mediation more accessible. Mediation is conducted
in the mobile home, and sometimes the disputing
parties are taken to the community mediation
center. The East Cleveland Youth Mediation Services
program estimates that the mobile mediation
project serves between 2,000 and 3,000 people a
year by conducting community and school conflict
resolution education workshops and mediations.
Roxbury Conflict Resolution Project
The Conflict Management Group (CMG), the Unitarian
Universalist Urban Ministry (UUUM), the
First Church Program of Boston, and the Program
for Young Negotiators (PYN) are partners in the
Roxbury Conflict Resolution Project in Massachusetts.
This community-based conflict resolution
training program has three primary goals:
♦ Joining with community youth in working from
the ground up to develop new ways of understanding
conflict, its causes, and its consequences.
♦ Assisting youth to learn effective skills and
techniques to deal proactively with conflict.
♦ Teaching conflict resolution skills to youth and
developing a corps of qualified peer trainers to
transfer their learning through a comprehensive
community outreach program.