By Richard Alper, Founder and Principal
In my first blog post, I described being energized by my first experience as a court-appointed mediator in Montgomery County, Maryland. In this post, I’d like to share a bit about how I continued to learn and grow as a mediator while also working as a commercial real estate attorney. My hope is that you can understand the types of experiences that form the building blocks of this career.
Starting a community mediation center
After my first experience mediating cases at the courthouse, I learned that some colleagues were looking into starting a community mediation center in Montgomery County. The Maryland judiciary had formed an agency to encourage the formation of new community mediation centers around the state, which included funding support.
I got in touch with my colleagues to learn more, and we decided to research the capacity for community mediation in the county. This involved investigating leads and talking to community members—two vital skills that often come into play in mediation work. We met afterward to compare notes and found that the need was there, so we applied to form a community mediation center and presented our application to the agency. The Conflict Resolution Center of Montgomery County (CRCMC) was formed, and it still exists today.
Learning on the job as a mediator
After forming CRCMC, we began our community mediation center work by reaching out to county agencies including landlord-tenant, consumer protection, and day-of-trial to see how we could help. I was able to work on a variety of interesting conflicts, including neighbor-to-neighbor disputes over rose bushes and lawns, tenants asking landlords for time to cover their rent, and disputes between business partners. I also facilitated consensus-based efforts for more complex projects including community playgrounds, transit stops, highway ramp relocations, mixed-use high rise developments, and comprehensive land use planning for a dense urban center near Washington D.C.
I gained valuable experience while facilitating the highway ramp relocation case. The State of Maryland wanted to divert an existing federal highway exit ramp around a small city on a river. Many small businesses in the city relied on the existing alignment of the ramp for customers, and environmentalists were concerned about potential river pollution from moving the ramp. The local governing body asked CRCMC to step in and facilitate these issues between the business owners, environmental groups, and government agencies.
We learned from the business owners that they lacked key information about the project. For example, the business coalition did not know why the ramp was being relocated, the county and state processes for relocating access to a federal highway, or the planned community revitalization program funded by the County.
We invited members from each group to give presentations with accompanying dialogue on their perspective and plans. We also led field trips to sites impacted by the project. Over the course of these presentations with dialogue, you could see participants listening with interest, learning together, and becoming less threatened about how the government and environmental processes would work for this project. By learning together and dialoguing with these presenters, the business leaders and environmentalists understood more about the project and its potential impacts. The parties became comfortable with the project and its processes so they asked the county and state to delay the project by a year, which they agreed to do.
These experiences narrowed differences and suspicions and helped the stakeholders see a way forward together. They also taught me the power of presentations, dialogues, and field trips to get stakeholders on the same page through common learning.
How volunteering at a community mediation center shaped my career as a mediator
My facilitation work at CRCMC showed me the power and meaning of learning from and listening to contrasting viewpoints and gave me foundational skills for being a mediator and facilitator. Instead of a “win/lose”, black or white ink blot, this work is more nuanced, like using many paintbrushes and a palette of colors to layer onto a canvas. I learned how to ask more questions to understand the point of view of a stakeholder and strengthened my ability to distill and summarize many opinions into a coherent narrative—all important skills you need to work in the conflict resolution field.
