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Heidi: Hi! This is Heidi Burgess. I'm with Beyond Intractability, and I'm here today with Bill Froehlich, who is with the Ohio State University Divided Community Project. We've been working with Bill for quite a while on a project that we're doing, looking at the Community Relations Service and doing an oral history of that program, which Guy and I started a long time ago, and we're doing more interviews with Bill, and that's been a lot of fun. But one of the things I know about Bill is that he works as Deputy Director, I think, of the Divided Community Project, which is something that I haven't known all that much about. So I was hoping that you'd tell us about it, what it is, maybe start with its history, and we'll then talk about what you're doing now.
Bill: Yeah. So my title just changed in November to director.
Heidi: Ah, okay. So exciting!
Bill: The Divided Community Project is a project that started here at the College of Law in about 2015. That's about nine years ago. And it started through a class, actually, because we've used this dispute systems design class or dispute systems design workshop that a couple of law institutions have. Stanford Law School runs a version of this. as has the University of Missouri. The Harvard Negotiation Clinical Mediation Program does this type of workshop too. And Nancy Rogers, who wrote this text on Dispute Systems Design with a number of co-authors, (it is one of the preeminent books on dispute systems design), has done workshops here at the college using that text, which led to a number of collaborative design-focused projects with other clients or sponsors.
For example, when I was a student, she asked my class — this is more than a decade ago, to think about what dispute systems design could do for redistricting and reapportionment in Ohio. Easy question, right? And in 2014 and 2015, she asked the class, "What could dispute systems design and mediation principles do for communities in the face of unrest? How could principles in mediation and dispute systems theory support communities in crisis?" And as I understand it, some of those questions emerged from her experience in about 2008, 2010, when she was attorney general for the state of Ohio, and worked with a number of communities in crisis and realized that perhaps dispute resolution, dispute systems, design, theory, and practice could support communities.
So she and another colleague here at OSU, Josh Stulberg, who's written a number of mediation texts and articles and is preeminent trainer, has long trained mediators across the country from some of the initial neighborhood justice centers to some of the initial AAA pilot projects 50 years ago, or more than 50 years ago. So she and Josh kind of worked together in launching the Divided Community Project, leveraging the work of students in the dispute systems design class nine years ago here at the College of Law.
The capstone of that class was to host a convening, a multi-day convening of leaders from across the country to bring together and to think about how dispute resolution principles could support communities in the face of crisis. So in April 2015, Nancy and Josh and the students brought together leaders from Sanford, Florida, where Trevon Martin was killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer, but where there were no arrests and no significant violence even though there were massive protests. Remember, the city of Sanford doubled in population [from outside protesters coming in]. So what did they do there? It was different from what we saw in other communities. There were also folks from Missouri in that convening. Michael Brown was just killed in Ferguson a short while earlier. We had advocacy experts, law enforcement leaders, and many of the stakeholders you might bring together when you do a stakeholder assessment who all came together here in April of 2015.
I was not yet a part of the project. I was a practicing labor attorney at that point in time. And that convening was so successful that the folks who were there said, "Look, communities really need guidance. They're desperate for guidance — two modes of it. One, an off-the-shelf guide on what to do in the face of unrest, when unrest comes to your community. It could be connected to the unjust killing of a black male, as we've seen, or a black female, as we've seen in so many cases across the country. Or it could be connected to an immigration issue, religious tension, LGBTQ issues. So our initial guidance was written really broadly to support communities in the face of crisis. That's guide number one.
And guide number two was how can dispute resolution principles, mediation principles support communities to plan in advance of community unrest? Why plan in advance? Well, I think Norton Bonaparte, the city manager in Sanford, Florida, would say, "Hey, look, we plan for tornadoes. We plan for hurricanes. We plan for earthquakes. We plan for other natural disasters. We don't plan for community unrest. We should be planning for that."
And as conveners, as mediators, as systems, designers, as facilitators, we have the skills to help people do an assessment, bring folks together into that room to do planning in advance. Even high-quality civil mediators, sorry, I moved my hand towards myself as if I am one. But the high-quality civil mediators out there, don't necessarily have the skill set to go out and mediate in crisis. That is a different skill set. And that is a skill set that Grande Lum and CRS and Justin Lock, now at CRS, and Becky Monroe (former CRS) very much have.
That's a different perspective from my perspective, from a classic civil mediator, right? But maybe a classic civil mediator, maybe a bar leader, maybe a faith leader, maybe a chamber of commerce leader can help communities convene in advance of a crisis. And ideally, a plan would come out of that. So people know what to do. Plans are designed to be broken, sure, but it's a starting point. But also, that planning process will help people build relationships so that those relationships can be relied on. And a community can respond with more resilience in the face of a crisis. So that's kind of the founding nine years ago of the Divided Community Project. And I'm happy to go in whatever direction you'd like to, Heidi.
Heidi: Well, first, I'm curious. I know that we've been talking about this a bit off and on as we've been working together. And it seems like there's a lot of CRS people who are involved in DCP. And I'm curious about the relationship there.
Bill: Nancy and Josh, in particular, have been trying to build a relationship with CRS for quite some time — before I arrived at Moritz. So for example, if you look back at our public lectures, our Lawrence Lectures here at the College of Law, Grande Lum was a Lawrence Lecturer. And I think that was designed to start a relationship with CRS. So Grande came and delivered a public lecture about negotiation and his work at CRS. And since I've arrived in 2015, which was a few months after this first set of convenings that we had, that the community project had, I've worked hard to build relationships with CRS and with Grande's guidance. Grande was DCP's first director. He came on board in 2016 as the Director of the Divided Community Project.
And he had just stepped down from his work at DOJ as director, as a Senate-confirmed director of the Community Relations Service. So that was a huge boon for us to get so much institutional memory from the Community Relations Service and bring it to the project. And Grande was able to help us build some connections. So we were fortunate.
We launched the Bridge Initiative, which is a CRS-style group of mediators in 2018, 2019. And we have four mediators presently who provide technical assistance, mostly, and do some conciliation and mediation in communities across the country. When we launched that program, Grande was transitioning to his work at Menlo College where he was Provost. He's now at Stanford Law School, but he was transitioning to Menlo. And we were able to bring on a former acting director of CRS, Becky Monroe, to lead the project and kind of launch this program. Becky's now in California and has launched a mini-style CRS for the state of California, or has helped launch one there. So that was a huge connection.
And around that time, I also was trying to do some presentations with CRS folks. So I was fortunate that Becky encouraged me to reach out to Justin Lock, who was then a conciliator, and now in 2024, is Acting Director of CRS. So we've been nurturing that relationship for some time.
We also have, on our bridge mediation team, two former CRS regional directors, Ron Wakabayashi and Thomas Battles. They will explain that CRS has 9 or 10 regions, but at one point in time, there were only two regional directors for the entire country — there is supposed to be one for each reason. That was Ron and Thomas. East Coast, West Coast, right? And so they have a ton of institutional memory. And so we have a strong relationship there, and we've been building on that relationship to connect us with mediators.
But then late in 2022, from my perspective, there was a kind of significant marker in this relationship between DCP and CRS. Early in 2022, we got some funding from we internally from our Mershon Center for International Security Studies. They are a great partner of the Divided Community Project's — they have provided funding, resources, and collaborative relationships. Our colleague Teri Murphy there is just an incredible resource. She's an international conflict resolution expert. And, I think, taught with Art Hinshaw Arizona State in the mediation program like a long time ago.
So Teri and Mershon seeded an event that we called Building Infrastructure for Civil Rights Peacemakers and Conciliators. And the idea of that event in May 2022 was to bring together folks doing similarly situated work that are often siloed. So we're thinking of CRS work, community-focused civil rights mediation. You know Heidi, we work on the oral history project together. And so I think that there are more than just CRS people doing that style of work. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're doing CRS conciliation. Perhaps individuals might be working to do de-escalation work in their community. Perhaps individuals might be doing violence interruption. Perhaps they might be doing other forms of community training. So we brought together, working with CRS and partnering with the Mershon Center and Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton, a group of folks who are doing similarly situated work connected to conciliation, civil rights mediation.
Because from my perspective, there are so many layers of this work. They're often disconnected. And perhaps if we bring those layers together, they'll create synergies in unique and creative ways that we can't expect. So the Mershon Center, fortunately for us, said, "Look, we see the vision. We see what your hopeful outcomes are, but we're not going to hold you to have concrete outcomes, like We will build 17 relationships after this event." They want outcomes, right? But they're comfortable knowing that they will emerge. So we brought together a handful, maybe about 8 or 10 conciliators from across the country, CRS conciliators, and Paul Monteiro, then Senate Confirmed Director of CRS, participated. And I think, Heidi, you reviewed Nancy Rogers' interview with him, which was kind of the pre plenary event on your blog.
And so we were really focused on bringing CRS in to that conversation. And there's a lot of players doing this work. Like The state of New Jersey has a CCRU. It's a community conflict resolution that's doing similar work. California now, for the past 15 months, 16 months or so, since late 2022, has had a CRU and its civil rights division. Again, Community Resolution Unit providing mediation and facilitation services. I just saw a press release in late January from the State of Pennsylvania, announcing that their Human Relations Commission is going to have a small office of community facilitators and mediators who are going to address community tensions and do some planning work in their communities. There's folks in Michigan who are doing some of this work, and I know there are others out there and I don't know of them. But I want to know about them. So if you know of one of these organizations, please, please email me at froehlich.28@osu.edu!
So we brought together some of these folks. And I think that built a lot of credibility in our relationship with CRS, with the Divided Committee Project's relationship with CRS, because I view all of this work as complementary, not competing, not jurisdictional. Nancy Rogers described CRS as the gold standard. but not the silver bullet, right? And it provides a high-level service, really competent, excellent conciliators. It might not work in a particular community.
Heidi: And they're so small.
Bill: That's right. They're so small right now. They can't be everywhere. And even as they're growing, you know Justin and Paul, the recent directors, have done a great job of hiring and trying to hire quickly. But you know a lot of them have less than two years experience, right? They're trying to go into community crises. That's tough work. And so at one point recently, and it may still be true, CRS conciliators, I think there were more conciliators with less than a year experience than with more than a year of experience.. And so you know wow, that's a challenge, right? So I know that CRS is hiring.
So I view all this work as complimentary. That event in 2022, by the way, there were some gaps, right? We really wanted to connect with CRS because we'd been trying to build a relationship for a number of years, but we didn't do a good job connecting with community mediation centers who are doing this work. Not all community mediation centers connected with NAFCM are doing community-focused civil rights mediation or something adjacent to that. A lot of community mediation centers are doing great work, but t's all court-connected. That's fine, right? This is not a judgment.
But we want to connect with people who are doing work in the community, trying to identify and address community conflicts that are searing at the social fabric of a respective community because CRS is going to work well in a lot of places. The Pennsylvania, this new Pennsylvania office, is going to work well in a lot of places, but it's not going to work in a lot of communities, too. And there need to be local community mediators doing this work and nonprofits who might engage in this work. And so that's how we've tried to develop our relationship with CRS.
And then the Divided Community Project was able to secure a significant grant from CRS, not from CRS, but where we're working in collaboration with CRS. But it's through DOJ's COPS Office, which is the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services— to work with and support CRS on a number of projects, CRS and others on a number of projects. So we're really excited about that relationship and how it's grown in the past few years. And I anticipate in 2025, which is a long way off, that we'll have another one of these building infrastructure conferences that will bring together a much more significant group of people to continue building these type of synergies.
Heidi: So I think you said a few minutes ago that you had four conciliators on staff, Ron Wakabayashi and Thomas Battles, both of whom are former CRS. And they are both people who I had the pleasure of interviewing on the recent round of oral history projects. Thomas's interview is available here. Ron's isn't available yet, but we will link it here, once it is. Anyway, they're amazing people. And there's two more I gather. So do they really going out under Divided Community Project auspices and getting involved in local disputes sort of the way they did when they were at CRS?
Bill: Yeah. So our Bridge Initiative is primarily and significantly funded by the JAMS Foundation. And that funding enables us to send out this team of mediators into communities. And so there are a couple of case studies that we've done about their work in communities. And we've had other contractors who are with us at different points in time. The two others, Andrew Thomas is one. Andrew Thomas, former leader of Rochester's Community Mediation Center. And he was behind the scenes in Sanford, Florida. And a woman named Daphne Felten Green, who worked inside DOJ in a variety of capacities throughout her career. We also had a former director of the major city's police chiefs, who was a contract mediator for us for a little bit, as well as a former mayor of a Rust Belt community and a former US marshal, as well, have worked on this initiative along with some volunteers. But it gives us the capacity to flexibly go where our services are accepted or requested. So it's hard, obviously, as a mediator to talk about what has taken place in these projects. I'll tell you that a lot of our work now is about technical assistance. So it might be, "Hey, you might get a call from someone. I'm struggling to gain entry in this community. What strategies do you have? Who should I be reaching out to? Here's what I've done so far." And sometimes we get calls from folks at another nonprofit, at a community mediation center, or at a state or federal organization. And we workshop things, right? Because Ron and Thomas and Andrew and Daphne have this depth of decades of experience. They have more than 100 years of experience doing this work between them. And so we workshop issues. And sometimes we go into communities.
We recently did an assessment in a New England town where youth were facing some tension related to race issues. But that assessment is between us and the community, and we consider that confidential as a mediator would. The public illustration of our work is from Bloomington, Indiana in 2019. In Bloomington in the summer of 2019, there were some Black Lives Matter protesters outed a farmer at a farmer's market who was a white supremacist. So for a series of weeks, Black Lives Matter protesters were working with the city-ish, right, to protest peacefully adjacent to the farmer's market and directing about this one particular farmer. After a few weeks of protest, the farmer's friends show up to protect her with AK-47s—Indiana is an open carry state. And the mayor shut down the farmer's market, put the farmer's market on pause. You can imagine there's a lot of tension in the community. You know Farmer's markets are a big deal in the community. My wife and I have sold for our friends who are organic farmers or organic-ish farmers here in Ohio. We love going to farmers market. They're nice environments. Farmers rely on them for business. So their business interests, the shutdown, community wanted to go to family-friendly spaces and places. But there were also underlying tensions connected to race, right? Farmer's markets might not be welcoming spaces for people who don't look like you and I, Heidi, right? And so there's a lot of tension about racial relations in Bloomington, which is probably a progressive town for Indiana, right? It's college towns where IU is. But you know the KKK was founded in southern Indiana. There are legacies of white supremacy from a lot of directions in southern Indiana. And so we were in conversations with city leaders about providing mediation or facilitation services to the community. And we agreed to go into the community to help them work through the farmer's market issue, but if we could also help them grapple with the underlying tensions in the community, that's even better. Because the farmer's market is fine, and that's an important issue to address and help them work through. But there are more systemic challenges here. And so we sent in a team of mediators. At that time, Bill Johnson was our primary mediator, the former mayor of Rochester, New York, former Urban League Director. We conducted an assessment on the ground with a set of interviews. Bill Johnson did it. Becky Monroe, our then-director, did a survey of community members. And after the assessment, we suggested an approach to the City of Bloomington that they take. And then from there, there are a series of outcomes that took an inordinate amount of time, primarily because the pandemic started. So everything just took more time. But the City of Bloomington out of that has a Future of Policing Task Force that has interim recommendations that have moved the needle a little bit, maybe not far enough. Also, they have taken an equity lens to their approach to their city services and have worked to enhance equity from a number of perspectives in that community. And I'm happy to share a link to a case study that we developed for that from the divided community project. That's public because the city leaders wanted to make it public. And we said, "Okay." And so there's a video of Becky and Bill Johnson's work on YouTube. I'm happy to share that work there. The city had a public report —we gave them a report that they made public—which is fine. That's their choice. It's essentially our assessment. And I don't think the city has that link up anymore because it's two administrations ago now. But that's one illustration of the work.
[Heidi notes that DCP has several more case studies available on its website: Winston-Salem, NC; Rochester NY, Orlando, FL, Columbus, OH, and the Strengthening Communities Project.]
You know In 2020 and 2021, we were providing technical assistance. This team was providing technical assistance, consultation to communities across the country. What are your ideas for keeping people safe from communities that hadn't faced protests before or significant protests? Ron Wakabayashi also has a depth of history working with Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. He was the director of the Japanese American Citizens League in the '80s when there was a domestic truth and reconciliation commission called the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. It was about the internment of Japanese-American citizens and some Pacific Islanders as well. And so Ron provides some consultation to Truth and Reconciliation style commissions as well. So that's another opportunity that we have through our Bridge Initiative.
And frankly, we take calls and emails all the time. A lot of them are from Columbus, right? And that's fine, but we work anywhere. I think we work anywhere, and we're happy to take a phone call from anyone who wants to talk through what services we might be able to provide or what ideas we have. We help communities move forward.
Heidi: How do you keep your door from being knocked down? It strikes me that there would be so much demand for this, and I thought CRS was tiny. You obviously are way tinier than CRS. There would seem like there'd be enormous demand for this kind of thing.
Bill: Yeah. We have no full-time staff working on the project. I teach full-time here at the college. Carl Smallwood, our Executive Director is part-time. We have a fellow Ben Wilson right now. He also has a whole teaching load. Yet we've got a number of projects. I think a lot of people don't know about us beyond the dispute resolution community. I do also think some police chiefs and elected leaders are hesitant to reach out to others. But as mediators, we treat every conversation as confidential. We hold that to ourselves. That's our practice.
Now, we workshop things as a team, right, as a mediation team of contract mediators. And we meet regularly to workshop problems and go over the status of where we are with respect to our technical assistance. Sometimes in those conversations, though, the contacts are so private that the names are not shared, right? And that's fine. But we workshop problems regularly. And we take calls and respond to emails from anyone who gives us a call, or we try to gain entry in particular circumstances as well where we think we might be in a unique position to provide services. We used to do that a little bit more than we do now because there is a little bit of I see a little bit of increase in demand. And our capacity is not overwhelming, right? But I appreciate you saying that about our door. There's a lot of that, a lot of the work. But the team is great, and we try to do what we can, right?
Heidi: Right. I was looking at the website before we talked and saw two initiatives listed there that you either haven't mentioned, or maybe you've been talking about them, but not using the name. Or maybe we haven't talked about them. The Community Resiliency Initiative and the American Spirit Initiative, are those still ongoing or things of the past?
Bill: So I think there are four other initiatives, including those two, that I've just mentioned. Our American Community Spirit Initiative and the Community Resiliency Initiative is connected to an academy program that we run, and I'll talk about that in a second. And then we also have a new emerging initiative called Campus Bridge, which I'll also talk about in a second.
So the Community American Spirit Initiative, we started back in maybe 2017, 2018. And it was an idea just to provide some systems design, a grounded experience, and how to bring people together. Maybe we can identify a spirit. I remember preliminary conversations in which we asked "what's the spirit of a community?" It doesn't actually resonate and apply everywhere. But where it does, how is it formed?
There's this community of Ashland, Ohio, on Interstate 71, driving from Cleveland to Columbus. There's this sign out there. And I don't know if this is made up or real or it's just supposed to make people smile, but it says, "Ashland, Ohio, world headquarters of nice people." It makes you smile when you drive by. Now, I don't know if people in Ashland even see the sign because they're not driving on that part of the highway. But what's the spirit of the community? Does it connect people? You know folks who think about social capital are always thinking about bridging and bonding. We have this problem that we don't have enough bridgers, right? Maybe if we have a spirit that 70% can point to and say, "Yeah, that's us." Maybe we'll do something to bridge neighbors, right? So that's the general idea of the community spirit or the American spirit. We suggested that this could happen for the country as a whole. But really, there are some practical concrete guides for developing a community spirit to bring communities together.
Heidi: Tell me a little bit about what those are. If a community were to call you up and say, "We're really divided. We want to bring people together." How would you go about doing that?
Bill: There are a number of ways to try it. And one thing that we say at the project is, one, we're not going to do harm, but two, we're not afraid to fail. So at one point in time, we were working just before the pandemic, I think, as well, we were working with an organization like a regional Lions Club, wasn't a Lions Club, but like a Lions Club or a Kiwanis Club or something like that, where they have regional lodges. And they were going to try to take a spirit approach in the Southern District of Ohio. They wanted to come up with a spirit for each of their organizations and then try to come up with a regional spirit as well. Because those organizations are folks that do some social capital bridging. They might also be you know also be dominated by white males, which is problematic, but these are starting points. So that's one way to do it.
In that guidance, we would suggest doing an assessment. Starting identifying who needs to be involved in this conversation, which is community-specific. What are the business interests? What are the advocacy interests? What are the political interests that need to be at the table so that you can have conversations about developing a spirit? And if that group recommends something, it won't get blocked, right? Because when we're dealing in political issues, one key component of the assessment is, okay, you know who's going to be actively involved? Who needs to be at the table to get their input, but who needs to be invited or at least know about the project so they don't block it. So they don't say, "Well, I didn't know about that," right — from all political perspectives. Now, some people might say that, but they don't really have the blocking authority or blocking power. But in conducting an assessment that connects to politics, those are some preliminary steps that we'd suggest.
There are other micro ways to do community spirit. There was a classroom in a local school that took us up on this. It was an art classroom that took us up on the community or American Spirit idea. The kiddos in a middle school art class made a quilt of what the American spirit looks like to them. And it's cool. It's really cool. There's a basketball thing happening in one part of the quilt. There's a non-white scientist who invented something to address a disease. There's the spaceship, right, in another part. But the task was to decide what "the American spirit" means to those kiddos who are in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, right? And the quilt is just down the hall from me. And it's nice. So you know that's like a little micro project, right?
So that's the American and Community Spirit project. And those guides are still are up on our website, and we're happy to talk through them. We don't focus on that project as much as we did four or five years ago. Now, our current project which is in that realm, is that we're focused on the guardrails of democracy and speaking out about the guardrails of democracy. That's a tangent of the first project. It's a little tangential to the bridge work that I've been talking about, the CRS style work that I'm talking about. And it's work that CRS, is not going to touch that, right? It's too politically hot. But that's work that we have the flexibility to touch.
So last year, we drafted some guidance for leaders and to encourage leaders to speak out about democracy issues because we thought that as dispute resolution practitioners and lawyers, because we're housed at a law school, that this is a lane for us, that talking about the law and protecting the guardrails of the law and democracy was a lane that we should be operating in. The link to that project is https://go.osu.edu/dcpdemocracy and our resources are there. So those initiatives, in my mind, The American Spirit and the Guardrails of Democracy are connected.
You also asked about our community resiliency initiative. This initiative was kind of moving forward in connection with some early pilot projects where we were trying to get communities to plan in advance of community unrest. And in one community here in Columbus where Carl Smallwood, who's now our Executive Director, was the chair of Greater Columbus Community Trust. This is an example of one of these pilots. That group met for years, on a monthly basis, about 10 times a year, to talk about planning in advance of community unrest. And it was a really interesting experience in building trust and building connections.
And you know I think some folks in that group say, "What were the outcomes that we ended up with?" Did we write a plan? No. We didn't get consensus to write a plan. But there are a number of tangible outcomes that came from this conversation. So one was we were able to run a simulation of community unrest internally and then to test it. And DCP now runs a series of simulations inspired by a woman named Ken Braswell, an advocate in the community who said, "Look, no one's going to pay attention until we show them what this is like. So let's do a simulation." So we drafted one. And three months later, we tested it as the Greater Columbus Community Trust. And then we ran it with the mayor of Columbus and his senior leadership. I'd like to think that that informed some of his decision-making during actual protests. And did he make all the right moves? There's always room for improvement, right? But now we have a series of simulations that were inspired by that Columbus Community Trust work.
There was another meeting, though, after Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville, Virginia, there was an after-action report in Charlottesville, Virginia that was led by a gentleman named Tim Heaphy, who was the former US Attorney for the Western District of Virginia. If that's the right district, I might be getting districts confused, but he was a US attorney, right? And he came to Columbus, and he presented his work to the Columbus Community Trust—he explained what he did. And we had, at that particular meeting, I think the right players were in the room to hear his presentation. And this was the Columbus Community Trust. We had, I don't know, eight advocates in the room, leaders from five police jurisdictions in the metropolitan area, leaders from the mayor's office, from accounting there. And importantly, the person who would become the city attorney was there. Then after 2020, there were protests across the country. There were protests here. The city attorney in August, I think, of 2020, secured funding to do an after-action report for the City of Columbus connected to all of the protests and demonstrations in the summer of 2020. And while he did not say this, he was in the room when Tim Heaphy presented his report. So I can't tell you that that's why he did it. But it's clear that he saw the value of doing an after-action report to get several hundred thousand dollars to fund doing one. Now the city of Columbus is taking action steps from that after-action report, right? So it's a meaningful outcome. A third outcome.
In December of 2020, in the peak of COVID and after the summer after George Floyd's murder, there were two law enforcement involved shootings of unarmed black men in Columbus. And both those cases, for a variety of reasons, were transferred to the US Attorney's Office. And the Columbus Community Trust hosted a 90-minute community forum, which was live streamed on Facebook and YouTube, and several hundred members from across the community attended that.
It had three components. There was a trauma component for people who were grieving in the community. There was a faith component from a diverse group of faith leaders to share messages to the community. And then leaders from the Columbus Community Trust interviewed the US Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio for half an hour taking live questions from the audience. And that event, I think, that event demonstrated how the Trust was helpful in conveying credible information to the community. It wasn't just the US attorney at a press conference. It was the US attorney being interviewed by folks who community members recognized, just after folks talked about trauma-informed practices that might resonate, and faith leaders talked about how they're supporting the community. That event was really dynamic, and it was amazing to be a part of. But I think it gave credibility to what the U.S. attorney was doing. And frankly, he said just a little bit more than he had said previously. He didn't say anything that he shouldn't have said about the ongoing investigations. But those are outcomes of the pilot project. So that was the Community Resilience Initiative. So there were these pilots. Columbus was perhaps most robust. There were other communities who were doing work in very different ways.
And then we have this Academy Program that is designed to train community cohorts, about eight people from communities across the country in DCP's concepts. So we train them in dispute systems design skills, and help them design a process to identify or address issues searing the social fabric of their community, okay, and then send them back, okay?
So we trained, I don't know, 16 communities and have five pilots. So that's the cohort from the Community Resiliency Initiative. We don't meet often, though we used to, but some of the meetings were robust and others weren't, right? And that's perfectly okay. But right now, we also hold office hours occasionally for communities. So, for example, after there's a traumatic national event, we'll hold office hours and invite that group of people to participate and reflect and engage with us because we've trained them previously.
One other note about that Academy Initiative is we are also interested in you said people might be banging down the door. We know people need this work. And you know people from New York are like, "Well, why would I call Ohio State?" Well, right now, we have an academy program funded through AAA-ICDR to do academies in partnership with the National Civic League. We'll have one here in June with Fordham at Fordham Law School, and there'll be one in September at Stanford Law School. So we're trying to expand the reach and also encourage other institutions that have the capacity to do this community-focused work to do— it and do it with us. Because this work is really exciting, meaningful, and engaging. So anyway, so that's the Academy Program. You can read more about it here.
And then I'll briefly just mention the Campus Bridge Initiative. Responding to what's taking place in the Middle East, we are providing a series of resources for campuses that campuses might use with respect to students and conflicts emerging on their campuses. They are not written for the war in the Middle East specifically, but they do apply to those issues. So there's a checklist for students who want to extend support to other students. Right now is a guide for how to lead a campus in these times. We'll have a resource probably by the time this video is posted for a checklist of considerations for campus law enforcement officers to consider when planning for divisive events and protests. And there will be other resources that will be announced shortly.
Heidi: I'm wondering if you are giving any thought to what's possibly going to develop as we get closer to the election and after the election. There's a lot of people who are worried, obviously, about increased tensions. Is this anything that you're planning for, thinking about responding to, doing any preventive work around?
Bill: So Heidi, the answer is yes. Absolutely. There are a lot of there are a lot of considerations. During the last election, we were involved in a number of ways. We made a number of videos for some of our stakeholder groups, for instance, how faith leaders can have conversations with people from diverse political perspectives, how bar leaders can do that, how others can do that because we had connections in those communities. And we have a number of connections with bar leadership groups. We also hosted a series of trainings for students here locally about how to have good conversations with people, right? And so those are some local issues.
We also, last summer, thanks to the Provost Office here at OSU, launched a series of new classes at OSU. We kind of spearheaded them. Nancy Rogers and our program director here —Katrina Lee —kind of spearheaded them in launching new classes on civil discourse here at OSU to give students the capacity to engage across difference in a variety of ways. And frankly, those classes were designed so that they could be robust in the fall of 2024 because we know there will be tension. More tensions even than there are now with respect to the war in the Middle East, I think. So that's one way we're working.
There's also crowd control issues. CRS, as you know from the oral histories, used to do conventions. They used to do crowd marshaling. They saw the protest issues at conventions. I don't know if they're still doing that work. I think that takes a lot of training and capacity. But I know one thing that's challenging for CRS to do is issues that are close to politics, right? Because then a Director or a Deputy Director has to go testify to Congress about what they did. Or they might get a call from an angry congressman or senator from any direction, any political direction. Why were you doing that? But we can do a little bit more in that space.
And so I think there are so many good people out there who are addressing issues connected to political violence, whether it's the Carter Center in Atlanta or the folks who are on the ground in DC. BDI, Bridging Divides Initiatives, who has a list of people who provide de-escalation training in all 50 states, or a friend, Dan Rowe, at Savannah Mediation Center, who trains election officials all the time about how to de-escalate, right? That's a critical component.
And so in figuring out what our lane is for that, could DCP do de-escalation training? I'm sure there are better providers out there for it. Can we give technical assistance, knowing that protests are going to happen connected to the election? Yes. And CRS might not actually be able to do that. So hopefully, we have capacity to provide technical assistance with respect to those issues to communities who accept or request our assistance.
But also, we have the guardrails issue. We think speaking out about democracy issues is something that lawyers are uniquely situated to do, not necessarily dispute systems designers, and mediators precisely. But we think that if you take a look at our democracy programs, our Democracy Guide, that there's a lane for everyone there to speak out.
Heidi: All right! So have we covered the campus initiative now. Are we missing some of the things that you are doing that we should talk about?
Bill: Yeah. So there's one other initiative that I didn't mention that I need to. And obviously, in 2020, I think the dispute resolution and conflict resolution communities generally refocused their attention on race and equity issues. And if you look at the national statistics from Pew or Gallup, you see issues connected to race went up in our consciousness, and people understood that there are equity issues in America, and now it's slowly drifting back down. And I feel that in the dispute resolution community as well, that folks were really focused on race and equity issues and now are moving back.
And so there's one initiative that I want to just touch on briefly. I mentioned that Ron Wakabayashi has provided technical assistance to truth and reconciliation style commissions. But the Divided Community Project is also studying Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and attitudinal and situational barriers to advancing race equity through an interdisciplinary lens. We are working with a team of social scientists and planners. It's fun because some of the planners were trained by Larry Susskind and Josh Stulberg is also on our team. So we get a little bit of Susskind-Stulberg debating going on. And so we're in the middle of a coding project, and I'm excited to see what outcomes come from that. But one of the first steps in that was a symposium series that our Journal on Dispute Resolution hosted called Rethinking Systems Design for Racial Justice and Equity.
I hope that folks keep one eye or part of one eye on advancing equity issues and thinking critically about equity issues, particularly in the context of neutrality and impartiality in the conflict resolution and dispute resolution communities. I know you've interviewed a ton of folks who have thought critically about this and are still thinking critically about it. But I just want to emphasize that I hope we are all still thinking in that direction and that particularly white folks like us are carrying some of that water and also stepping back when others who have lived experience are in a space or place where they are carrying that load, but making sure that they have support for it. I wish I said that more artfully. But as you're asking about other issues, I just hope that we as a community continue to emphasize equity issues in conflict resolution and dispute resolution, particularly as we grapple with neutrality and impartiality.
Heidi: That's been a big theme of our discussions for the last couple of years. And Larry Susskind has weighed in on that on one side, Bernie Mayer has s weighed in on the other side. And it's coming up again in context of Israel-Palestine. I think it's one of the areas where both the dispute resolution and the peacebuilding communities are really undecided about what our role is and should be and how to move forward. And I just think we have to keep on talking about it. It's not one of those things that's easily resolved, but we've got to keep grappling with the questions.
Bill: Absolutely. I'm with you 100%, and I appreciate your focusing on them through those conversations. And frankly, you were focusing on that question in the Oral History Project 25 years ago. My students read occasionally Wallace Warfield's interview. He was grappling with these issues in 1989 and did so before that he was writing as many have, right? But I think we need to just keep this on the front burner or close to the front burner because it applies in so many contexts. And of course, you know our students ask us. I know you are still teaching. Our students ask us, "Well, what's neutrality mean —in class number two?" They're like, "Well, is there's such a thing?" I respond "What do you think it means?" Because I don't know. Do I have my own definition? Sure. Is it crisp, artful? No. But when a student asks, you know they've got to grapple with what that means and what that means to them because it's more complicated than, for example, the Supreme Court of Ohio's definition of neutrality in one sentence, right? It's much more complicated. So thanks for doing that. And thanks for this conversation, Heidi.
Heidi: Well, thank you. Thank you very much. I really appreciate getting the opportunity to learn more about what DCP is. And we look forward to sharing that more widely and all the links that you gave. And I hope you get a little busier as a result!
Bill: Haha, I don't know if I can be a little busier
Heidi: Thanks much, right? How about you get more downloads of your materials?
Bill: Oh, yeah. We don't mind that. That's right. That doesn't cost time.
Heidi: All right. That's right. Well, thank you very much!