Mediation project helps neighbors work out problems

ST. LOUIS -- It's not always a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

The guy next door won't muzzle his barking dog. The able-bodied woman down the street regularly steals the handicap parking space. Someone lays on his horn at 7 every morning to pick up a friend for work. The newly arrived immigrant parks in the alley and no one can explain to him he's not supposed to.

Nothing criminal, just the irritating stuff of neighborhood life that tends to fester and could get really ugly.

Enter the peace-seeking, peace-loving Mennonites, looking for opportunities to give peace -- even in the neighborhood -- a chance.

Last year, two small Mennonite congregations in St. Louis approached Washington University law professor and attorney C.J. Larkin -- a mediation expert -- to help them launch a community mediation program. One year of planning and many more players later, the St. Louis Partnership for Community Mediation is about to get under way.

Larkin, who teaches mediation theory and practice, and works as a contract mediator for family courts, founded and ran a community mediation program for the Southside Women's Center in St. Louis from 1996 to 1999. She will train the new program's first crop of 30 volunteer mediators this weekend. Once trained, they'll be paired with professional mediators, who also are volunteering their time, to help squabbling neighbors work out their differences.

'A true believer'

Signed up for the June training are city employees, Larkin's clinical law students, Mennonites and others motivated by faith, a retired lawyer, a social worker, educator, and others.

Who knows? It could be a lovelier day in the neighborhood.

"I really believe in this," Larkin said. "I'm an evangelical mediator, a proselytizer, a true believer. I find 90 percent of mediations are successful." She said it can transform lives, avert physical violence, and free police officers to do police work. "They don't have to go back to the dog-barking house for the fourth time," she said.

Larkin considers mediation an early-warning system, a more peaceful, personal, less formal way of resolving disputes; better, she said, than bringing in the "bureaucracy, the man on your back."

If resolving disputes peacefully comes naturally to Larkin, who will direct Washington University's alternative dispute resolution programs starting July 1, mediation as a ministry is instinctive to the Mennonites.

Larkin said it sometimes happens that one party is ready to mediate, and the other has to be convinced. Howard said he found that once mediation starts, with ground rules, the reluctant party almost always stays because he senses fairness in the process.

"We don't tell you what to do," he said. "We give you the tools to work it out yourself. You can't really lose when you do it that way."