Community Mediation:

Reflections on a Quarter
Century of Practice

Scott Bradley, Melinda Smith

It isfitting that this issue of Mediation Quarterly, one of the last before it
transforms into a joint publication of confederating organizations, is devoted
to community mediation. During the past twenty-five years, community
mediation has provided much of the momentumfor the growth and diversity
of the alternative dispute resolution movement in the United States. At the
same time, it has faced many challenges as the larger dispute resolutionfield
grows and evolves. How community mediation responds to these challenges
will shape its role and placefor the next generation.
In this issue, we have asked some key leaders and practitioners in the
field to reflect on the development of community mediation and the challenges
as we move into another century ofpractice.

Community mediation in the United States has evolved along two different
paths-generally parallel, occasionally merged, often philosophically divergent.
One path evolved out of the social and political activism of the 1960%primar-
ily as a response to the urban disorders of that time (Bush and Folger, 1994). The
other evolved out of efforts, both within and outside government, to
reform the justice system. The potential of community mediation, and the chal-
lenges that might impede this promise, can be found in these dichotomous roots.
The court-focused movement was largely a response to the perceived inef-
ficiency of the court system. In 1965, a presidential Commission on Law
Enforcement and the Administration of Justice focused national attention on
our country’s overburdened judiciary (President’sCommission, 1967). Its find-
ings helped build consensus around the need for reform and experimentation
in and around the court system, with particular focus on minor criminal
cases involving neighbors, relatives, and other acquaintances. These views were
reinforced nearly a decade later, in 1976, by the National Conference on
the Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice
(American Bar Association, 1976).

vol. 17, no. 4, Summer 2000 0 Jossey-Bass, a Wiley company

MEDIATIONQUARTERLY, 315
31 6 Bradley, Smith

Early programs included the Philadelphia Municipal Court Arbitration

Tribunal (1969); the Columbus Night Prosecutors Program (19711, which used
law students to mediate cases in thirty-minute time slots; the Institute for
Mediation and Conflict Resolution in Manhattan (1975); and the Miami
Citizen Dispute Settlement Program (1975) (McGillis and Mullen, 1977).
The goals of these court reform programs still sound familiar to us today
(McGillis, 1997):

Divert cases from court case loads.

Provide more appropriate processes for selected types of cases.
Provide more efficient and accessible services to citizens.
Reduce case processing costs to the justice system.
Improve citizen satisfaction with the justice system.

On the other path, the more community-focused centers were established

as an activist response to the urban disorders of the late 1960s. Community
conciliation mechanisms were viewed as an opportunity for citizens to partic-
ipate in the prevention of and early intervention in conflicts as an alternative
to institutional mechanisms. At the heart of the early community mediation
movement were principles of democratic participation, drawing on citizen
rights and responsibilities and the involvement of networks of community
organizations (Shonholtz, in this issue).
Bush and Folger (1994) observe that proponents of the early community
mediation movement expected that the mediation process would have a pos-
itive impact on living conditions in urban centers by affecting underlylng lev-
els of intergroup and interpersonal conflict. Not only could mediation afford
participants a sense of power and control over their lives, but it could also
“humanize people to each other, help them to look beyond their assumptions
and see each other as real persons with real human concerns and needs, even
in the midst of disagreement-it can evoke recognition” (Bush and Folger,
1994, p. 51).
Mediation was viewed as “an empowerment tool for individuals as well as
communities to take back control over their lives from a governmental insti-
tution [the courts] that was perceived not only as inefficient, but also as
oppressive and unfair” (Hedeen and Coy, this issue).
Early community-based models include the Rochester American Arbitra-
tion Association Community Dispute Service Project (1973), a broad-based
response to conflicts in the community resulting from changing racial balances;
the Boston (Dorchester) Urban Court Program ( 1 9 7 3 , a court-connected
but storefront urban neighborhood justice center in a rapidly integrating
Irish-American neighborhood with growing racial tensions and fear of crime;
and the San Francisco Community Board Program (1977), founded by Ray
Shonholtz. These programs shared some of the same goals as the court reform
programs in developing more appropriate and accessible forms of dispute res-
olution, but went beyond that to do the following:
Community Mediation 317

Seek to encourage decentralization of the control of decision making in

communities.
Create a parallel, community-based justice system that addresses disputes
well before they enter the formal legal system.
Develop indigenous community leadership.
Work to reduce community tensions by strengthening the capacity of neigh-
borhood, church, civic, school, and social service organizations to address
conflict effectively.
Strengthen the ability of citizens to participate actively in their local democratic
processes for effective self-governance (McGillis, 1997; Shonholtz, 1984).

Issues and Challenges

How well has the field of community mediation achieved the diverse goals of
these dual paths of development? Twenty years later, Dan McGillis’s retrospec-
tive review of community mediation (McGillis, 1997) observes that the field
has fulfilled its promise in several important ways. Not only has community
mediation grown from a handful of programs to more than four hundred in
every major city and almost every state, but there is also an increasingly diver-
sified range of dispute resolution services offered by those programs. Also
impressive are the state-level support mechanisms for community mediation
in a number of key states, including New York, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas,
and California. A few other states, such as Massachusetts and North Carolina,
have nongovernmental state-level support organizations. Further, the com-
parative research findings on program impact suggest that community medi-
ation programs are perceived by disputants as delivering a high quality of
justice and tend to be viewed more favorably than court case processing.
Despite the gains of community mediation, the field faces significant chal-
lenges. The dual development path of community mediation is expressed
today in some of the tensions and competing directions in the field. Commu-
nity mediation centers have had a long and significant relationship with state
and local court systems. Nearly half of the member centers of the National
Association for Community Mediation receive over 50 percent of their case
referrals from their court systems. Partnerships between community mediation
centers and the courts have allowed citizens to participate in the justice sys-
tem as volunteer mediators and have enhanced justice services. However, as
Tim Hedeen and Patrick Coy argue in their article in this issue, a host of issues
emerge in these partnerships, such as the appearance of coerced participation
and the pressures of institutionalization.
Assisting to resolve interpersonal disputes is an important core function
of many community mediation centers. But centers that view such activities as
their primary-or only-function will find themselves marginalized if they
ignore or fail to engage in broader community dispute resolution functions.
Three executive directors of successful centers identify a range of other
challenges in brief articles in this issue profiling their centers. The biggest
318 Bradley, Smith

challenge Cheryl Cutrona of the Good Shepherd Mediation Program in

Philadelphia identifies is getting disputants to the table to maintain case loads.
She also notes the needs to strengthen and professionalize staff and organiza-
tional capacity. Liz O’Brien and Betty McManus of the San Diego Mediation
Center identify funding as a primary challenge of their center. They also dis-
cuss the need for community mediation to project the appropriate image of a
quality provider of dispute resolution services. The San Diego Center has
added commercial mediation and arbitration to its menu, thereby providing
services that are more typically the province of attorney and mediators oper-
ating independently of nonprofit centers.
In our view, if community mediation is to achieve its original goals and
thrive as a significant force in communities in the new century, it must meet
four critical challenges:

1. Create mechanisms for quality assurance.

2. Expand the capacity of community mediation to fulfill its community
building goals.
3. Ensure that center staff, boards of directors, and mediators reflect the
diversity of the communities they serve.
4. Strengthen leadership and organizational development capacities of
centers.

Quality Assurance. Quality assurance is a significant challenge identified

by Harry M. Boertzel of the Oakland Mediation Center in his center profile,
noting that “community service does not license mediocrity.” Indeed, one of
the most pressing challenges of the community mediation field is to agree on
appropriate approaches to the adoption of standards and quality control for
centers (not individual mediators). In a first effort to address the issue of stan-
dards and qualifications, the National Association for Community Mediation
(NAFCM) (1996) developed a policy statement about quality assurance that
was circulated to membership and others in the field. This statement focused
not only on mediator performance but also on the quality of mediator train-
ing, monitoring, and organizational competence as indicators of quality ser-
vice delivery During the next three years, NAFCM will take the next step of
developing a mechanism for center assessment andlor certification.
Community Building. As dispute resolution organizations confederate
and merge, NAFCM has chosen to maintain its organizational autonomy (as of
January 2000) because of its unique community mission. As Raymond
Shonholtz asserts in his article in this issue, the center of the community con-
ciliation movement has been its democracy-building mission, drawing on cit-
izens as dispute resolvers of conflicts before they reach institutional dispute
resolution processes. Shonholtz’s vision of community mediation is based on
citizens’ and community-based organizations’joining together to reduce or pre-
vent interpersonal and community conflict, an exercise in civic responsibility
Community Mediation 319

and meaningful democratic participation. As the mediation field evolves and

as more programs and practitioners affiliate with courts, many community
mediation advocates want to preserve this early vision.
Diversity. Ensuring that citizen mediators reflect the diversity of the com-
munities they serve is one way to accomplish the community building goals
of the field. Janice Tudy-Jackson and Roberto Chene engage in a dialogue
about diversity issues in their article from the perspective of multicultural lead-
ership. They point out that community mediation centers must engage in com-
munity building; work to bridge cultural, racial, and class differences; and be
willing to be adaptive in structure and dispute resolution processes.
Given the growing diversity in American communities and the interests of
diverse voices in participating in decision making, Shonholtz asserts that com-
munity mediation should expand its role to include change management for
broad social and community issues. Centers are already being called on to
intervene in a spectrum of public issues, from race relations to the use of
national forest lands. With the devolution of government to the local level,
opportunities are emerging for centers to ensure that decisions about the use
of public funds and other resources involve the meaningful participation of all
citizens. In his contribution to this issue, Andrew Sachs provides a review of
the types of processes and public cases community mediation centers are deal-
ing with, but points out that the field needs to improve its documentation of
what it has accomplished.
Leadership and Organizational Development. If community mediation
centers are to take on an increased role in assisting communities to resolve
complex public disputes, it is imperative that staff and volunteers receive the
necessary training and mentoring to assume this role. Indeed, leadership devel-
opment in general is critical if community mediation is to advance its historic
mission. As some of the oldest and most respected centers make the transition
to second- and third-generation leadership, it is imperative that the new
directors have skills in organizational change management. It is equally impor-
tant that they understand the foundations of the past in order to weave them
into the fabric of new challenges that community mediation faces.
Community mediation centers are uniquely positioned to assist commu-
nities with many of their most pressing challenges, such as violence in our
schools and families; issues of growth, diversity, and change; and the enhance-
ment of citizen participation in local decision-making processes. They can
energize neighborhoods and communities by strengthening relationships and
building connections and understanding between people and groups and can
create and manage processes that make communities work for all of us.

References
American Bar Association. Report of the Pound Conference Follow-Up Task Force. Chicago: American
Bar Association, Aug. 1976.
 Bradley, Smith

Bush, R.A.B., and Folger, 1. P. The Promise of Mediation: Responding Lo Con& Through Empower-
ment and Recognition. San Francisco:Jossey-Bass, 1994.
McGillis, D. Community Mediation Programs: Developments and Challenges. Washington, D.C.:
National Institute of Justice, 1997.
McGillis, D., and Mullen, J. Neighborhood Justice Centers: An Analysis of Potential Models.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977.
National Association for Community Mediation (NAFCM). The Community Mediator. Washing-
ton, D.C.: NAFCM, Summer 1996.
President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. Task Force Report:
The Courts. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967.
Shonholtz, R. “Neighborhood Justice Systems: Work, Structure and Guiding Principles.”
Mediation Quarterly, 1984,5, 3-30.

Scott Bradley is executive director of the Mediation Network of North Carolina. Active in
community mediation for over twenty years, he helped start North Carolina’sfirst center and
was afounding cochair of the National Associationfor Community Mediation.

Melinda Smith served as founding cochair of the National Association for Community Medi-
ation and executive director of the New Mexico Center for Dispute Resolution. She is now a
private mediator, facilitator, and dispute systems designer.