The Crown Heights Community Mediation Center is a safe, neutral place where young people and adults can come to express concerns, settle disputes, and work together to achieve common goals.  The Center’s mission is two-fold: to bring local residents together and to provide the community with tools and resources to resolve its own conflicts. By promoting public safety, encouraging communication, and fostering the strengths of the community and its residents, the Mediation Center offers a unique approach to violence prevention, confliction resolution, and community building.

The Mediation Center convenes a training session.

The Crown Heights Community Mediation Center is an official vendor for the New York City Department of Education (#FUN02200) with over 10 years of experience providing supportive services to students, parents, human service professionals, teachers, police, clergy, and many others. Our areas of expertise include mediation and conflict resolution; youth courts; cultural diversity; and school-wide strategic planning. We offer programming for young people and adults.
 
Programming for Young People

Conflict Resolution Training
In In these trainings participants are taught to see conflict as a natural part of life, as well as an opportunity for growth and positive change. Through interactive games, theater activities, and visual arts, participants are engaged in building skills such as active listening, anger management, effective communication, cross cultural communication, and creative problem-solving techniques.

Youth Court Training and Implementation
Youth Courts are an innovative, student-directed response to school-based conflicts and disciplinary problems. In Youth Court, students are trained to serve as judges, jurors, and advocates and then determine sanctions for their peers who have committed low-level school infractions such as fighting, vandalism, or cutting class. Youth Court gives the school administration creative ways to deal with in-school problems that might otherwise lead to suspension.  The Center can help prepare both students and staff for the challenges and triumphs of creating an in-school Youth Court. 

Peer Mediation Training and Implementation
Mediation is a structured, voluntary, and confidential process in which people with a dispute sit down with an impartial third party to help them identify issues, create options and find mutually satisfactory solutions.  Trained student mediators help their peers resolve disputes, developing their own leadership skills in the process. The training incorporates games, discussion, role-playing, and team-building to introduce students to mediation principles and skills.  Peer mediation programs are based on the belief that young people can take responsibility for their feelings and behavior and have the ability to address conflict constructively.

Bullying Prevention Training
The Mediation Center can provide programming for both elementary and middle school students designed to improve students’ positive social interactions with each other and decrease bullying behavior. Through a series of activities and discussions participants learn how to build empathy and become allies for one another, addressing issues such as gossiping, “snitching,” popularity, violence, sexual harassment, sexual orientation and suicide.  Connections between bullying behavior and societal identity-based prejudices are addressed in an age-appropriate manner.  For elementary school students, the PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) curriculum is used as a central component.

 Cultural Diversity Training
Mediation Center staff work with participants of all ages to more thoroughly understand themselves and the cultures they are a part of, and learn ways to share those cultures with their peers and their community. Cultural contributions from around the world such as stories, dance, music and food are shared.  Concepts such as inequality and systemic oppression and resistance are taught in developmentally appropriate ways depending on the age and abilities of participants. Students of all ages are taught how to interrupt prejudicial remarks and stop bigotry.

Programming for Adults

General Conflict Resolution Training
In these trainings participants are taught to see conflict as a natural part of life, as well as an opportunity for growth and positive change. Through interactive games, theater activities, and visual arts, participants are engaged in building skills such as active listening, anger management, effective communication, cross cultural communication, and creative problem-solving techniques.

Conflict Resolution for Parents
The impact of school-based conflict resolution programs increases when there are community and parent education programs that support the skills being taught in classroom. Parents can reinforce the conflict resolution skills that are being used in the school environment in the home and in the larger community. Parent workshops assist parents in listening to their children and helping their children articulate their feelings and their needs. A common vocabulary around conflict intervention provides consistency which aids children in learning emotional development. 

Train-the-Trainer Conflict Resolution
Conflict is an inevitable and normal part of life that can be used as an opportunity for learning and growth.  It is important for youth workers to have the capacity to train young people to respond to difficult situations in a thoughtful, non-violent manner. Through interactive games and activities and group work, the Mediation Center will provide a train-the-trainer program for professionals working with youth, giving them skills to train young people in active listening, interpersonal development skills, bias awareness, decision-making, problem solving and presentation skills.

General Mediation Skills
Participants learn a six-part model of mediation, including gathering information, building an agenda, generating movement, the use of caucuses and fostering agreement.  Mediation Center Staff focus on the underlying skills of mediation, offering tools for getting to the heart of a conflict, and facilitation skills like reframing, detoxifying, and active listening.

Family Mediation Skills
This training includes basic mediation skills, with a special emphasis on tools for addressing conflict within families. Specially designed for human service professionals working with youth and parents, the training proceeds with the help role plays focused on family crisis situations.  Participants learn and practice the principles and core skills of mediation, and their applications in maintaining and improving family relationships.

Diversity and Identity Workshops
The Mediation Center's diversity training is designed to provide participants with a thoughtful, fun and interactive experience where they explore issues such as identity, privilege, and power.  Through large and small group activities, role plays, discussions and games, participants examine cultural expectations.

What Else Does the Mediation Center Do?

• Resources, referrals, and service links on a variety of issues, including job and housing assistance, counseling and mental health, drug treatment, shelters, and health care
• Free monthly immigration clinics for residents in need of immigration legal assistance
• The Crown Heights Leadership Training Institute to provide key community development skills for up-and-coming community leaders
• Truancy Intervention Program (TIP) to address the challenges of truant students through individualized conferences, family conferences, and peer-led youth court at Middle School 352.

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Eleanor Anderson, Program Associate
Crown Heights Community Mediation Center
256 Kingston Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11213
(718) 773-6886
trainings@crownheights.org