News & Events

Anne completed the 40-hour general civil mediation training in April 2007. Since then, she has completed her mediator internship and begun volunteering for many mediations at the Dispute Resolution Center. Anne is also an active office volunteer and spent approximately 175 hours in 2009 helping the DRC staff with many projects and various kinds of case work. Anne is employed at the National Opinion Research Center with the University of Chicago. She is also an general civil mediator for the 17th Circuit Court in Kent County. She somehow makes time to volunteer for other organizations, including Boy Scouts of America, Alzheimer’s Association, Advocates for Senior Issues, Disability Advocates of Kent County, and the Legal Assistance Center. Anne is an active member of her church and mentors high school students. Thank you, Anne, for all of the time and energy you have invested in the Dispute

Resolution Center this past year. We really appreciate you and your talents!

Why has Bill generously served as both a mediator and a board member over the last eighteen years? “The DRC is a hidden jewel in our community,” he says. “I love seeing the growth of the organization as we find new opportunities for mediation to bring peace to neighbors, to coworkers, or to anyone who has a disagreement. It is rewarding for me to work with people and help them re-build bridges.”

“I have watched this organization become more financially savvy, as well as more attuned to the needs of our community. It’s not easy for a nonprofit to expand its services while also staying in the black, but we have taken that challenge seriously. Now we have the classic challenge of increasing demand in the face of continuous economic pressure.”

Bill advocates that mediation is a healthier, faster fix than the court for many situations. “Mediation helps people learn skills they can use in everyday life. Learning to talk your way past an impasse in a relationship is a skill that you’ll use over and over again.” Bill would love to see additional partnerships between schools, businesses and the DRC. It would be a win-win for both, and would more firmly cement the principles of peaceful coexistence in all of our neighborhoods.

We are seeing continued growth in our victim-offender mediation program. Restorative justice involves holding offenders accountable directly to their victims. The process is about meeting the needs of victims and having the offender make amends. We are working with prosecutors, juvenile courts and schools to identify cases that would benefit from this kind of mediation.

Partnerships are an important part of our efforts to promote restorative justice. In April, we collaborated with several victim service agencies on a small grant from the federal Office of Victims of Crime to promote National Crime Victims’ Rights Week. We are also working with the Michigan Prisoner Reentry Initiative and other local offender programs to encourage the use of restorative justice approaches.

As mentioned in the article about our domestic mediation services (below), we have seen tremendous growth. We are teaching cooperative parenting and helping parents keep children out of the middle of their conflicts. In the process, we are becoming a more valuable resource for our family courts. In addition, changes in the child welfare system due to the state’s settlement of a federal lawsuit have created an opportunity for the DRC to facilitate important permanency planning meetings in several cases.

We are trying to promote our landlord-tenant mediation programs and have plenty of mediators. We are developing more youth-oriented programs, including truancy mediation and school-based restorative justice.

Our partnership with Thomas M. Cooley Law School is rapidly growing and resulting in mediator training and externship opportunities for law school students. And finally, we are becoming a stronger organization with the help of a Michigan NOW! capacity-building grant.

All of this work is only possible through the generosity of volunteers and donors. Thank you to everyone who helps make the dream of peaceful co-existence a reality through the work of the Dispute Resolution Center!

Mediated divorce is still painful. However, mediation keeps the parties talking to each other. It can move along substantially faster than an adversarial court process. More importantly, it focuses on the well-being of the parties who are typically not at the table to speak for themselves: the children.

Divorce can tear children apart, but ongoing conflict between parents is even more damaging. Children can get caught in the middle of feuding parents, often used as messengers or spies. Sometimes there is less regard for their well-being, and more concern about counting parenting time.

However, in mediation, parents are coached through the process of creating their own parenting plan.  They agree who will be the primary parent and who will be secondary, and what parenting time each will enjoy. They talk through plans for education, financial responsibilities, discipline, religious upbringing and more, so that they can both provide consistent reinforcement in the same direction. This is healthier for children and for parents.

The DRC’s domestic mediation cases increased 200% from 2008 to 2009 (42 to 125). Of those, divorce cases increased from 24 to 67. The Dispute Resolution Center works with the courts to identify appropriate cases and then provide trained mediators. Domestic mediators receive 44 hours of instruction, including information on domestic violence, and must complete a hands-on mediator internship experience.

Mediation provides parents with a low-cost way to reach agreement on the terms of their divorce, create a cooperative parenting plan, and avoid the cost and emotional damage of court battles. We can’t prevent divorce, and we can’t prevent the pain of separation. We can help parents recognize the importance of keeping kids out of the middle, and show parents how to work together peaceably on parenting issues.

As they talked with the agency representatives during mediation, they gradually perceived the enormous repercussions of their actions on many people: the people who solicited the donated goods for the auction; the people who purchased the gift baskets; the people who would have benefited from the sale of the baskets; and many more.

“We just didn’t think,” admitted one of the girls. “People worked hard to get those donations and we ruined their work.”  The girls wrote letters of apology, made restitution for the stolen items, and also volunteered at the next event for the agency.

“Everyone deserves a second chance,” remarked the Executive Director. “Hopefully these girls have learned a valuable lesson. No one is an island—our actions always impact someone else.”

The concept of restorative justice—making amends for harm that has been done—is just one way in which the Dispute Resolution Center seeks to have a positive impact on our community, fulfilling needs of victims as well as helping to prevent future crime.