Four Forms of Conflict Resolution Education and Services

In our six programs, we practice the following four forms of Conflict Resolution Education and Services:

We bring all parties together in healing circles within a conflict, dispute, or offense to do the following: 

• Delineate the facts of what happened;
• Assess the nature of the pain, suffering, harm, or offense; 
• Identify consequences; and 
• Devise plans (including verbal agreements, written and signed agreements, or mental health treat plans with the aid of medical or clinical referrals) for accountability, amends, healing, and justice.

When community members are in crisis involving direct, imminent threats to their safety or well-being (or perceived threats) and they reach out to us for help, we aid them with one-on-one or group mediations and negotiations to do the following:

• De-escalate the situation so that the individual or group is in a calm, sober state of mind to make the safest decisions.
• Ascertain the facts of the conflict.
• Talk through or negotiate so that the individual makes decisions that do not involve harming themselves, others, or their environments.
• Affirm and humanize the individual or group so that they can move from a place of strength and resourcefulness instead of breaking down.
• Encourage the individual or group to understand the natural, logical, or imposed consequences that inform their actions (see the definitions below later on this web-page).
• Setting clear behavioral boundaries (including articulating the limits of what we can do in the crisis situation and what they can, should, could, or cannot and should not do).
• Providing referrals or contacting entities for mental, physical, or medical help, including groups with whom we have engaged previously like Baltimore Crisis Response and Thrive.

Amnesty Day is a program model invented by our Executive Director, Miss Cleis Abeni (tree turtle) in 1990. 

Amnesty Day is a regularly occurring community health program module in which participants sit in a talk circle/healing circle and do the following work:

• Apologize for recent or past offenses; 
• Share how they are making or wish to make amends, and listen to suggestions for amends;
• Ask for or request forgiveness; 
• Speak kind words to someone (present or not present) that have not yet been spoken. 

This program module is a series of deeper, longer, more intensive, and immersive mediations and Amnesty Days that seek to find permanent, lasting accountability for a group-oriented conflict, offense, or dispute (especially ones from the past that still resonant today) involving multiple individuals or parties of people. Community members form an official grassroots commission for advanced, extended mediation with deadlined reconciliation in mind. We are one of the few organizations in the world to deploy this form of Conflict Resolution specifically for local communities and families within cities rather than for governments or nation-states. Over the last six years, we have carried out four of these series (each lasting two years) for families with generational disputes, and groups of people impacted by the drug trade.

We differentiate between managing conflicts (de-escalating feelings about differences and regulating our responses and behavior), transforming conflicts (the hard work of making amends and reintegrating into communities); and resolving conflicts (hoped-for endpoints involving fully realized, longterm problem-solving, reparations, agreements, and making amends.)

We value holistic, integrated approaches that implement a variety of ways to mediate and negotiate a range of conflicts, disputes and offenses. 

Our approaches are rooted in the nonviolent restorative methods of the early to late 20th century Black American Civil Rights movement and in Indigenous Native American methods (especially those taught by Ruth Locklear Revels (1936-2016) of the Lumbee Nation). 

Here are a few preventative and interventional elements of our approaches:

• Ascertaining facts from multiple vantage points; 
• Considering how feelings frame and influence the understanding of facts;
• Engaging in social-and-emotional learning by differentiating between constructive feelings, productive feelings, destructive feelings, and protective feelings, as well as ascertaining when these feelings overlap.
• Bringing different or opposing groups together within a community to work through conflicts face-to-face; 
• Uplifting the views, needs, and wants of victims and survivors in a community; 
• Bringing those who offend into conversation with victims and survivors; 
• Finding community-centered ways to hold those who offend accountable without punishment (meaning, without pain and suffering);
• Uplifting amnesty in which authentic apologizing, making amends, finding forgiveness, and forging genuine kindness are regularized;
• Making, keeping, and re-making agreements that articulate accountability and the making of amends.