The Center for Court Innovation

Mediation

OVERVIEW

Community-based mediation is a structured, confidential, and voluntary process in which people involved in a dispute sit down with a neutral third party and attempt to resolve their conflict. Mediation, as practiced in places like the Crown Heights Community Mediation Center, can provide a positive, non-adversarial way to solve conflicts. A mediator does not offer solutions, but instead facilitates an open discussion in which both sides present their views.

ARTICLE

In-School Mediation: Conflict Resolution in a Brooklyn School
At New York City’s Middle School 61, high levels of conflict between students—often leading to physical fighting—has been a chronic problem. Over the last three years the Crown Heights Community Mediation Center’s School Justice Center, which works intensively with schools to transform their culture and promote peaceful resolutions to conflict, has offered mediation services to students in an effort to resolve these conflicts. Mediation not only broadens students’ ranges of options, but offers a place where parties in conflict can understand each other. And the confidential and private nature of mediation provides students with a space separate from the pressure of their peers and family members to address the issues at root of their conflicts.

read more | more articles

INTERVIEW

Dan Weitz oversees dispute resolution programs for the New York court system. In March 2005, Weitz spoke with the Center for Court Innovation’s Carolyn Turgeon about mediation.

What is the philosophy behind mediation?
A process like mediation leaves more control over both the process and outcomes with the parties. The mediator’s job is to help people share information and to listen to each other, to identify issues and come up with options—and hopefully the options come from the parties. The intent is to give the parties the opportunity to resolve disputes on their own terms and in a matter that’s usually fairly creative. The remedies that are available in mediation are often broader than what a court can order. So you see mediation used in complex commercial cases where you have significant business interests and the parties want to preserve a relationship. It’s not just about saving time or money. It’s about preserving relationships, trying to come up with a win-win creative solution that’s tailored to the specific needs of the parties.

You see it in family cases, particularly with parenting issues, where having a custody battle in which one parent wins and one parent loses doesn’t bode well for the future relationship of the parties. So it’s not only in the parents’ interest but in the child’s best interest to do everything we can to encourage the parents to work it out themselves. And if they can come up with a parenting plan that they agree to, they’re more likely to stick to it so the outcomes are more durable and lasting.