Lipscomb prepares bi-lingual volunteers to become community mediators
Janel Shoun |
Luckily, the resolute people described above are just role-playing for a training exercise, but their pretend attitudes are likely to be quite a common situation for the 12 bi-lingual community mediators certified by Lipscomb’s Institute for Conflict Management (ICM) earlier this month.
Twelve bi-lingual volunteers with the Nashville Conflict Resolution Center (NCRC), a nonprofit corporation that began as a project of the Nashville Bar Association, went through a 32-hour intensive training at Lipscomb in order to help Nashville’s immigrant and Hispanic community navigate troublesome conflicts such as contract disputes, family disagreements or employee quarrels.
The 12 students are now apprentice mediators in a program of a NCRC program offering Spanish/English mediation at the Woodbine United Methodist Church on Nolensville Road.
“This is the culmination of over 12 months of planning through outreach to Hispanic community leaders and residents,” said NCRC Board Chair and Nashville attorney Bill Norton. “We intend to make a difference by fostering peaceful dispute resolution among people who may otherwise escalate their conflicts. We are grateful to the ICM for their expert training of these bi-lingual volunteers.”
Community mediation has been shown to reduce the number of conflicts ending in bloodshed, the criminal courts or the civil courts, therefore reducing violence and costly litigation in our community.
Five years ago the NCRC began volunteering in general sessions court to provide mediation if the parties were amendable. The center also strives to inform the public about mediation, and thus has often taken on cases for private individuals outside of the court system, said Louis Siegel, an NCRC board member who attended the training at Lipscomb.
The new bi-lingual mediators are an expansion of that effort to take on private disputes and resolve them before they go to court, he said.
"Bi-lingual mediators are a necessity in a city that may rightly be called a 'Melting Pot of the South'," said Larry Bridgesmith, ICM executive director.
In the 1990's, Nashville's foreign-born population more than tripled from 12,662 in 1990 to 39,596 in 2000. The city is also home to the largest Kurdish population in the United States, a growing Hispanic community and Asian people that have added to the economic well being of our communities.
“Such ethnic and religious diversity inherently results in disputes caused more by misunderstandings in cultural orientation rather than by actual differences in personal interests,” Bridgesmith said. “We at the ICM wanted to be a part of making our local body of bi-lingual mediators even more effective at helping people recognize their commonalities by overcoming the barriers often attributed to culture.”
“The Nashville Conflict Resolution Center is to be commended for sponsoring the growth of volunteer community-based mediation and conflict management skills through the training of bi-lingual mediators to better serve our neighborhood,” he said.
The first in the Mid-South region to provide graduate training in dispute resolution, Lipscomb’s ICM offers a variety of learning experiences and has hosted several community forums featuring guest speakers such as British humanitarian and former hostage negotiator Terry Waite. The ICM also fosters community relationships, including its collaboration with the NCRC.
NCRC, a Tennessee nonprofit corporation and a member of Community Shares, relies on the generous support of private individuals, corporations, and grant foundations, including the Tennessee Bar Foundation.