708-524-1230
  • Home
  • Condo Conflict
    • Good Conflict, Bad Conflict
  • Work with me
    • Cost of Mediation Work
  • About
    • Qualifications and Experience
  • Blog

How does your condo handle conflicts

6/10/2015

0 Comments

 
Here's the big question: do you have a system in place, more or less, where conflict can take place safely, without a ton of pain, destructiveness, or violence?

In countless associations, there is a system: the Declaration and By-laws, rules and regs, policies and procedures.  All helpful tools, but they do not create a place where conflict can live.  In fact, the framework they provide can make having conflict confusing, risky, and scary.

Other institutions have rules but have created restorative systems. In many thousands of schools in the U.S. and around the world, for example, you have "peace rooms".  They should more properly be called "conflict rooms": everybody in the school knows that's where you go to have a conflict--safely, respectfully, and nonviolently.

I visited such a room last year in one school--Sullivan High School on Chicago's North Side.  In a very integrated neighborhood, with 20 percent Black kids, 10 percent Arabic origin, 20 percent white, plenty of Hispanic, and so on, the principal took me to the Peace Room on the second floor.  He told me the worst class of school disturbances had gone from 120 to 25 a year--in twelve months!! 

And for a visitor walking from a condo workshop to the rest room and back, the hallways exuded calm, safety and community spirit.  A Chicago Public School high school.

Does your condo association have a restorative system?  Send an observer from your Board to Sullivan High School to learn how to do it.


0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    June 2017
    February 2017
    August 2016
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    August 2012

    Author

    John Cabral, Oak Park Mediation and Conflict Support

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

John T. Cabral
Oak Park Mediation and Conflict Support
110 S. East Avenue #2S
Oak Park, Illinois  60302-2987

708/524-1230  [call and let's dive right in to your conflict]
cabral@oakparkmediation.com
Photos used under Creative Commons from badjonni, bpende, myfuture.com
✕