Supervisor Meeting

    I met with my supervisor, M, at Centro this last week. At the meeting we discussed the ideas that I had, of the staff being trained and the need to decide and choose who might be able to fill the role of mediators. M agreed with me that the training would be a good idea. We talked about the possibility of doing the training with either the Portland organization or the Beaverton center, to which we both agreed would be of great benefit. So I am going to contact those centers and look into the possibility of them providing training for the staff, and compare that to what it might look like if the local center were to provide the training.
   We also talked about how the next little bit of time would look like, and that it is imperative that M start looking for people to assume the role of mediators and be trained, and set up a mentoring period with the local dispute resolution center. I am planning on moving away from the area, but will continue to help from afar as best as possible, and to provide any services I can so that Centro can have a mediation resource for the Latin community here in Lane County. M also talked about networking with other centers in the county to help one another out with providing sufficient resources to the Latin population. Everything just might start to be coming together, and I hope to be able to get things scheduled for training, or at the very minimum find out if these two centers would be able to provide such a service. The work continues...

Help from CRES

    This past week I received some help from a fellow CRES student, whom I will refer to as L, and for all intents and purposes refer to L as a she. I went to L's presentation on the thesis that she had done regarding Latin culture and mediation. During the course of her project she went around to the majority of the community dispute resolution centers in Oregon and interviewed people regarding their capacity to work with members of the Latin community. I had met with L before regarding her work, and was really curious to see what she had to say in the presentation, and how everything had been wrapping up for her with the thesis.
    After the presentation I spoke with L about my internship and asked if there were any dispute resolution centers in Oregon that she interviewed, showed or displayed a capacity to work with the Latin community. She informed me that there were two that stood out to her, and that she felt would be best suited or able to have cultural understanding with that particular population. The two centers were the Beaverton community resolution center, and an organization in Portland called Resolutions Northwest. She said that these two organizations by far seemed to not only provide more resources for the Latin community in regards to mediation, but also displayed a higher capacity to train and build capacity in others. This was exactly what I was looking for, and will incorporate this into my plans, and hopefully everything will work out.

Some Ideas

    Here are some of the ideas that I have for the next steps of developing a mediation resource for the organization that I am working with. I think that the first step would be to have all of the staff that will be referring people to, or working with, the mediation resource center to ALL be trained in basic mediation. I think that this would help to not only provide a support system for which the resource center can thrive, but also help the staff to understand how mediation works, as well as how they can best utilize its help for their clients. With any resource, it is important to understand first what it is and how it can help, before being able and feeling comfortable to refer others to its services. Included in this training would be the element of cultural understanding and capacity building that I have been thinking about lately, and blogging about most recently.
    I also think that it would be a good idea to then have the few people that will be providing the resource of mediation to the clients to continue working with local mediation centers and practitioners to be able to further understand mediation and know how to progress in its usefulness. In some recent meetings, one of the local centers here in Lane County has said that they might be able to provide a type of mentoring to the people that will be mediating for Centro, which we are grateful for, and I think that this will be a key piece in the resources development. From here, I think that it would be good to then develop hours, once the mediators are ready, for the center so that people can know when they are able to receive the needed help. I think that this is a good starting point. I will continue to kick these thoughts around in my head, and see what else I can think of in the mean time.

Where to go... finding capacity

    Of course the idea of capacity building for cultural understanding is something that I have been focusing on, after all my internship is with Centro Latinoamericano. As I consider what might be some of the next steps for the internship, I am curious to see if there are certain places that do trainings which would have a higher capacity of cultural understanding, to be able to incorporate that more into the training, more than what I received in my basic training. I don't want to show or give the idea that the basic mediation training provided to me by the local community center and faculty of the school was insufficient, or bad. The training itself was great, and provided a great opportunity to not only meet other practitioners and faculty, but a needed time to practice and further understand how mediation works in the typical setting here in the U.S. My only feedback would be that we might have learned more to build our cultural capacity.
    And so, in my search to see where to go with the resource center building for Centro, I am curious to know if there are some community dispute centers that might have a higher capacity for teaching cultural understanding and capacity building opportunities than others. I wonder if there isn't a couple of organizations that might be a better fit for training a Latino staff than others, even if others might be closer. In my opinion, the capacity building portion is far more important than simply trying to find the closest place for which you can be taught and trained in mediation principles. I guess the place to go from here will be to try and find any information that I can regarding who might be a better fit for the capacity building training for cultural understanding... the search begins.

Capacity Continued

    Continuing on the topic of Cultural Capacity. In my undergrad, I was taught about how to understand other cultures, and how to objectively look at the influences upon me and my culture as well as others and their cultures. It was an incredibly enriching experience that has helped me immensely in my studies of peacebuilding and conflict resolution. While still in my undergrad, I also received a certificate in Intercultural Peacebuilding, which helped me to understand how the principles of conflict resolution might transfer, or not, to other cultures based upon the style that we were being taught.
    My teacher of the Intercultural Peacebuilding certificate (Dr. Chad Ford) did an amazing job of helping us to understand that we need to always work on learning more of other cultures and how these concepts would work with whatever culture we were interested in. By continuing to learn about other cultures and what influences these cultures, we are strengthening and working on our cultural capacity.
    When I started my graduate studies, I was required to go through a basic mediation training. The training was 40 hours or so, and was much of a review for me, having already received some mediation training through the certificate. One of the differences that I noticed however was the section that was dedicated to cultural sensitivity. With my first experience the class was called Intercultural Mediation, and was dedicated to understanding how to not only learn a classic style of mediation but to incorporate cultural sensitivity at its core. The second training was like adding a couple of decorative pieces of cultural sensitivity. Needless to say, I was slightly frustrated with the lack of capacity building that the second training provided to the students of my graduate class. I think that this is key to being able to work in the world of mediation, because we are all influenced by different things in our lives, and thus all have and hold a slightly different culture that we call our own.

Intercultural Capacity

    With the idea of a person being able to work cross-culturally, it is important to understand that the capacity to be able to do this is something that can be learned and improved upon. Thinking about the training that I have received in Intercultural Studies and Peacebuilding, I can't help but think about the learning process. I was taught about my own culture, Western/American, first to be able to understand how I viewed the world around me. Then the readings and teachings went to the understanding of other cultures and how they viewed the world. Reflecting upon these two examples, I would like to talk a little about why it might be set up the way that it was. It isn't easy to understand how another views the world without first being able to understand how we view the world ourselves. The process of introspectively understanding our world is a delicate one. The reason I say that it is delicate is because it is hard for us to allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to reflect upon our world in an objective manner. We don't like to feel vulnerable, ever, and when you begin to look at your life and the reasoning of why you do the things that you do it can be difficult to grapple with.

    I remember sitting in my first culture theory class, with one of the best professors I have ever had (Dr. McArthur). He assigned readings from Marx, DeSaussure (spelling?), Hall, Gramsci, Hegel and others. All of the readings addressed different parts of the culture in which we lived, whether it was the symbols and signs that we use to describe things (languages) or the hegemony and how it came to be in power, where the influence of it all comes from. You begin to realize that you have been influenced your entire life by others and that you are a product of society. Depending on what society you live in at any given point in time, you will be influenced by that society. For people that have been born, raised, and stay in one society and culture, the influence of those have more of an impact. Once, and only once in my opinion, we are able to understand why we are the way we are, we can then begin to look at other cultures and try to understand the influences that they have been introduced to or "had" by (the controlling influences are in power).