News : CDRC in the News
Settling conflict close to homeSeptember 19th, 2009
As Published in the Ithaca Journal and the Star-Gazette - September 19, 2009
Monday is the United Nations' International Day of Peace when people across the globe promote efforts to end conflict and realize peace. With violence dominating the headlines, it's easy to feel helpless and become cynical about symbolic markers.
At the Community Dispute Resolution Center, we specialize in transforming the feelings of helplessness wrought by conflict into feelings of empowerment that enable constructive responses to conflict. Hope lies in action, and in the recognition of the connection between what we do in our own lives, families and communities with what happens in the larger world.
The center provides expert mediation for those in conflict, employing a dialogic practice called the transformative model. It's well-named, because mediation at CDRC often inspires an almost alchemical process in which disputing parties find their voice, feel heard and learn to listen well - elements that are preconditions for achieving conciliation between disputants and for restoring their peace of mind.
Albert Einstein reminds us that, "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding." Mediation is a powerful tool that deepens understanding. Distinct from peacemaking or peacekeeping, mediation offers the local component to the global process of peace building - defined as the work of creating culture around a core of mutual understanding.
In that sense, peace building is akin to community building, for each hinges on the classical tension between the one and the many and fosters recognition of "the other." We are fortunate in the towns and cities of Chemung, Schuyler and Tompkins counties to have so many people focused on community building, for they are also then, in a sense, peace builders.
Indeed, the relationship between community building and peace building parallels the relationship between local peace work and international efforts. The Dialogue Project provides a case in point.
Led by Marcia Kannry, the project brings Jews and Muslims together to mediate the divisive issues between the two peoples. Kannry, applying the same transformative model we use at CDRC, notes extraordinary results, where disputants who had once cleaved to polarizing views come to understand one another's perspectives, to clarify their own responses to the conflict, and thus to start the process of resolving it. So deep are the social taboos against even talking to one another that project participants' identities must often remain confidential, yet their leaps in understanding create a cultural shift in an ever-widening ripple of people moving from anger to recognition and from conflict to conciliation.
Previous PageAt the center, we too routinely witness such transformations in our mediations, and so nurture hope for the cultural shift that generates the conditions for constructive conflict resolution. The poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi sings, "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there." CDRC recreates that field every day to help spare thousands in our communities the devastating costs of ongoing conflict. And we will always be ready to meet you there.
Jeff Lydon is the executive director of the Community Dispute Resolution Center serving Chemung, Schuyler and Tompkins counties. To learn more, visit www.cdrc.org.
