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Introduction:
Mediator Will Reed describes how his goal is to teach disputants how to solve their own problems in the future and to set up systems to enable them to do that which will last a long time.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Capacity Building through Systems Design
Will Reed
Former CRS Mediator, Denver Office
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[Full Interview]
Question: Were you able to reduce those hostilities that much in other situations?
Answer: Put it this way. That was one of my methods of operation that I went out for. Even
though I was attempting to mediate something, I had an agenda myself. And one aspect of
that agenda was to try to develop mechanisms, or suggest developing a mechanism within the
mediation sessions that will speak to the issue of communication, keeping channels open at all
times.
And how are you going to do that when you start talking about police brutality? You
want to look
at doing that. When you start taking about better compliance with city laws or ordinances.
When you
want to start talking about better garbage collection in a minority community or anyplace else,
what better
mechanism could you have, or what better organization could you have where police, social
workers,
school officials and others are coming together with minority leadership once a month instead of
letting a
crisis develop?
To answer your question about the proof that that trust level had been
developed was that in some cases, the minority community, and in this case, the Indian
community,
elected someone they supported to be president of that organization. He served for about five or
six
years. Then somebody else served. But the idea was that this was ongoing. Here's
a communication mechanism that remained open all of these years and it couldn't help but to
serve to
diffuse tensions as they existed throughout the country.
It's the same way in Bingham's Hispanic community. It's the same way. These things came
over
a pretty long period of time. It took a while to discover how we could come up with something
so that CRS
didn't have to be back in this town every few weeks. What can you do to help? So
instead of allowing somebody to use you as their flunky or something, you come up with a
mechanism and
in time you facilitated the scene. And if anybody else wanted to be the facilitator, then they'll be
a
facilitator.
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