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.