Sometimes, it’s about trying to iron out parenting issues after a divorce.
Other times, it’s there for a lawyer and tenant trying to stave off an eviction.
Still other cases involve conflicts at school, on the job or between neighbors.
And sometimes, the Mediation and Training Collaborative gets called in to help settle a small-claims dispute, to teach conflict resolution skills or even to coach someone on how to improve their own communication.
When it was started as an outgrowth of the University of Massachusetts Community Mediation Program, the idea of using mediation to resolve conflicts may have seemed as suspect as going to a chiropractor, recalls Cate Woolner, who co-founded the program in Greenfield.
“It was an uphill struggle for the first decade,” recalls Woolner, who then saw the program become part of what is now Community Action Pioneer Valley. Over the years, it’s added a host of offerings around family mediation, divorce mediation, housing and workplace mediation, as well as conflict-resolution training in schools and mediation around elder care.
“I think that mediation is more known, but I don’t think it’s really accepted as, ‘If I’m in a conflict, this is the first thing I should think of,’” says Betsy Williams, the collaborative’s coordinator, who’s been with the program for 22 years. “For whatever reason, it’s a tough thing to stay afloat, even though it’s not too hard to convince people it’s a really good idea.”
Through the years, various funding sources have dried up for the collaborative, which at one time helped establish conflict-resolution at more than a dozen schools around the Pioneer Valley. Today, only one school program remains, at Great Falls Middle School.
Williams is the sole remaining full-time employee, along with five part-time workers as well as a team of trained mediators who serve as consultants on projects — among more than 1,000 adult mediators since 1987 who have been trained to work on a variety of programs.
Those programs help resolve conflicts over consumers to resolve “small claims” disputes and those between farms and businesses they contract with, as well as divorce agreements, landlord-tenant issues, and differences over parenting issues.
Maybe, it’s over a parent who’s left the family and left the area, but who wants to re-establish a connection with his child, says Court Dorsey, one of about 40 contracting mediators. In that case, maybe the father needs to work out an arrangement with his former spouse and the child over steps that can feel safe and good for everyone — their own plan, which can be entered into as a court-approved agreement, as a way of maximizing time that both parents get to spend with their kids.
And it’s a plan they’ve worked out, with a mediator helping them “talk and listen to each other, to get each other’s point of view,” free of old arguments that have a way of always popping up. As a mediator, Dorsey tries to make the process a way for both parents to listen to one another, to learn how to re-engage and adapt co-parenting to working for everyone.
Over the last year, the collaborative mediated cases with 832 people, more than three-quarters of whom reached their own agreements. Most of those agreements, though they weren’t imposed or suggested by a mediator or other parties, were respected by the courts, Williams said.
The collaborative, which also offers conflict resolution and communication training to the public and to schools, businesses and organizations, and does meeting and group facilitation, even has a “conflict coaching” service to help people trying to manage particular conflicts on their own.
“Communication is like a couples dance,” explains Susan Hackney, who coaches people negotiate recurring conflicts with a partner or colleague. That can be helpful even if the other person isn’t willing or able to work in mediation, she says.
“You can’t control the other’s person communication, but if you change your steps, the dynamic is going to change. All of us get caught in conflict at times, and sometimes we get caught in one we just can’t seem to get through … Some people recognize their conflicts have a pattern, and they want to change their part in it, to make the relationship better.”
Hackney also works with businesses to help a worker improve their communication skills in working with other employees.
Working mostly with state and federal grants, the collaborative has a budget of nearly a quarter-million dollars and provides many of its services for free. Others are charged on a sliding fee to make them accessible to everyone.
Even though the term “mediation” is better known than it was two or three decades ago, it’s still often confused with arbitration, and it isn’t necessarily readily considered by people as the way they should deal with a conflict they’re confronting in their own lives, says Williams.
“I think there’s such a cultural paradigm where it’s either-or, where (there’s a sense) we need some outside person to decide who’s right and who’s wrong, because we’re not going to agree … and then we get bitterly disappointed when a judge or whoever we go to as some outside authority disagrees. There’s just so much in our culture that supports that duality where it’s either-or, right or wrong, black or white. It’s supported in all our entertainment, that message runs very deep, that ‘you’ve got to get them before they get you.’”
Mediation, agrees Woolner, isn’t for people who are intent on “having their day in court and winning, and are utterly convinced they’re right and aren’t at all interested in hearing about the situation from the other side.”
Yet mediation, Williams says, “gives you control over whatever the outcome is going to be. And even if you don’t end up agreeing in mediation, you’ve been heard and probably have a better understanding of even your own point of view and why you have it.”
On the Web: communityaction.us
You can reach Richie Davis at rdavis@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 269