The Mediation Center services include:

Fee-for-service Trainings: We provide services for schools, community-based organizations, religious groups and others, offering trainings in conflict resolution, mediation, diversity and more.  Click here for a full listing of our available trainings.

Resource Links: As a walk-in community center on a busy street, the Mediation Center is well-positioned to understand and address neighborhood concerns.  The Mediation Center’s storefront location and open-door policy mean residents drop in to seek help, resources, and referrals for a variety of problems.  Last year, Mediation Center staff served 1,900 community members who were seeking assistance with issues related to housing, family disputes, community concerns, unemployment, and immigration—the latter through a monthly on-site immigration clinic run in partnership with the Legal Aid Society.  The Mediation Center also updates and distributes the comprehensive Crown Heights Resource Directory, designed to keep residents informed of where they can obtain services like counseling, job training, and day care.  Over 1,000 copies are distributed each year.


The Mediation Center brings together diverse groups for
trainings 

Facilitation Services: Facilitations are group sessions designed to promote understanding and tolerance among diverse groups in the community.  The Center’s role in this process can include everything from convening coalitions and facilitating dialogue, to providing space and administrative support.  Facilitation sessions can be useful in all kinds of situations – from working with a discordant block association to plan a street fair, to organizing a peace march to bring together residents after a violent event in the community.  Sometimes facilitating dialogue can lead to more long-term planning designed to improve neighborhood services. Last year, prompted by concerns about public safety, the Mediation Center organized local criminal justice agencies, service providers, faith-based organizations, residents and others around reducing crime in the area, with a specific focus on gun violence and the challenges posed by formerly incarcerated individuals returning to the community, without sufficient access to the appropriate services.

Leadership Training: The Mediation Center’s Leadership Training Institute brings together local community activists from diverse racial, religious, and cultural backgrounds to participate in a series of in-depth community-organizing trainings.  The Institute has three principal goals: to train a rising generation of community leaders to take prominent positions in the community; to create an opportunity for these new leaders to build open relationships with other young representatives from ethnic and religious backgrounds different than their own; and to build a new and durable multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious network of leaders who can work to tackle the problems that confront all Crown Heights residents.  Through the Leadership Training Institute, professional leaders gain critical skills while building relationships in ways that will engender long-term tolerance and respect.  Last year there were 14 up-and-coming community leaders in the Leadership Training Institute's inaugural cohort.  Monthly workshop topics have included coalition building, fundraising, community organizing, networking, and conflict resolution.

Youth Development Programs: The Mediation Center’s Youth Development programs work to build leadership and prevent violence among young people by providing them with tools for resolving conflict peacefully, teaching skills in communication and decision making, improving self-esteem, and engaging young people in service learning activities that allow them to develop and demonstrate healthy, responsible behavior.  Much of this work takes place within local schools as Center staff work with teachers and administrators to design and implement conflict resolution trainings, Youth Courts, community dialogues, and other programming designed to address school-wide problems and give students the ability communicate effectively, and make positive decisions.  The Center’s current youth initiatives include:

• TIP (Truancy Intervention Program), an anti-truancy program at Middle School 352 that combines: one-on-one meetings with students to identify individualized strengths and concerns and set clear attendance goals; family conferences to ensure that a student’s parent or guardian is a part of a coherent school attendance strategy; and a student-led Youth Court to hold truant students accountable through positive peer pressure. The program relies on a combination of early identification, individualized assessments, family engagement, student (and parental) accountability, responsive incentives and sanctions, and education to promote compliance with attendance regulations and foster greater connectivity to their school for chronically truant students.
• Rites of Passage, a program addressing issues that many young people ages 11-18 face as they move through puberty, helping them develop a positive self-image and a more comprehensive and healthier understanding of gender and gender relations in contemporary society. A school-based program, Rites of Passage provides young men and women with the opportunity to work with strong positive role models as they reflect on their own identity, their choices, their expectations and their goals. Each course runs for approximately two months and meets for twelve class sessions. Through the program, participants gain leadership, advocacy, organizational, and conflict resolution skills.
• Youth Courts, which utilize positive peer pressure to help young people make better choices. In Youth Courts, teenagers are trained to serve as judges, jurors, and advocates, choosing appropriate sanctions in cases involving other young people who have admitted responsibility for school infractions (in the case of a school-based Youth Court) or low-level criminal offenses (in a community-based Youth Court). Sanctions emphasize restoration to the community and address personal issues that the youth may have presented in session. The Mediation Center has over eight years of experience in implementing Youth Courts and provides technical assistance throughout the borough for youth-serving entities looking to implement their own. For example, the Mediation Center is currently collaborating with the 94th Police Precinct to establish and sustain a precinct-wide Youth Court in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.