Conflict Resolution Alliance (CRA)
Happy New Year, everyone. The year 2020 brouht many challenges and made us all realize our true core and priorities in life. We are ready to start the brand new year to break walls and build bridges to foster peaceful and collaborative community strength. Wising you all a healthy year 2021 & hope to see you in person this year! Conflict Resolution Alliance
With the 5:1 Kindness Challenge Commemorates Annual Intl. Conflict Resolution Day October 15, 2020 The Conflict Resolution Alliance (CRA) and four partnering organizations are asking the Hawaiʻi community to take a pledge of kindness—that is to perform five random acts of kindness each day for one month starting Oct. 15. Pledgers also commit to recognizing the kindness of others by posting videos or photos on social media that capture kind gestures happening around the community. The idea is to start a buzz about human goodness on social media, at the dinner table, or at the water cooler (at a safe distance of course) and to shift the collective focus away from the stories of disaster, destruction, and divisiveness we hear about in the news every day. There is science behind the challenge that shows how impactful one act of kindness can be. What separates healthy and happy relationships from miserable ones is a balance of positive to negative interactions. Think of it as a simple formula for building healthy relationships: It takes five positive interactions to make up for every one bad encounter you have with someone, a 5:1 ratio. Social psychologists call it the Golden Ratio. Even small simple kind gestures like a smile, a “thumbs-up” or holding a door open for someone can be banked for that one time your lesser angels take over. Beyond maintaining relationships, researchers from the University of Portland show that when we witness profound kindness our autonomic nervous system triggers an impulse to act altruistically toward others. This emotional state, called moral elevation, precipitates the urge to pay a kind act forward. Everyone is encouraged to participate in the 5:1 Kindness Challenge. By signing the pledge, participants also commit to spreading the word and getting at least one more person to pledge. The…
Sharing a White Paper of one of Conflict Resolution Alliance members, Jerry Clay, and Zoe Payne. Message from Jerry: Get informed and get involved below: if you like what you read, sign our petition and subscribe to stay updated on our progress and to find out how you can help us reinvent government. In order to solve houselessness, we must ensure every stakeholder–people experiencing being houseless, the nonprofit agencies working to assist them, the government, and citizens in communities who are impacted by houselessness–has a seat at the table when formulating a solution. This can be accomplished through a process called “Partnering.” In partnering, every stakeholder must attend a workshop designed to build a shared solution for the project. Workshop facilitators encourage the various parties to form relationships that act as a basis for collective brainstorming and problem-solving. At the end of the workshop, the group details their agreed-upon solutions in a document known as a “compact”–an aspirational agreement that provides specifics as to how the group will carry those ideas forward. Unlike our legal system, which assumes everyone coming into the system has access to the necessities of navigating it, partnering doesn’t require externalities like lawyers and paralegals or an in-depth understanding of law. Instead, it merely asks for participation, and its non-adversarial approach allows disparate groups to come together to problem-solve without concerns about power imbalances. It’s time government departments went through a partnering process with all groups both using and providing houseless services so that real solutions can happen together. I have been involved with partnering for over 20 years, and have worked with groups ranging from the Hawaii visitor industry to the Hawaii State Bar Association. To further explain how partnering is far better suited than our legal system for addressing civic problems, I will expand…
Sharing an article published in Civil Beat by one of Conflict Resolution Alliance members, Tom DiGrazia… We are now into September and the COVID-19 virus has claimed the lives of around 190,000 U.S. citizens and has currently infected over 6 million of our people with no end in sight. COVID has sharpened our focus on how collectively unhealthy we Americans are. The rampant incidence in America of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dietary abuses and lack of exercise and the accompanying related illnesses among us have been negatively hijacked by COVID-19. This hijacking has been created and worsened by design, ignorance and omissions in our nation’s predominant lifestyle in 21st-century America. This lifestyle of ill health and the adverse preexisting health conditions it manifests have made us extremely susceptible to this contagion. Our present federal government has also stripped away our democratic veneer. Our politics — particularly on the national level — have become extremely factionalized. For instance the politically metaphoric concept of Red and Blue states, parties, groups and individuals are more often now the perspective lenses through which many Americans observe the world. This fragmented perspective — us versus them, the “others” — includes traditional and obvious issues such as race, religion, immigration, and mass proliferation of guns. Yet this cultural divide now embraces fear-based COVID-related concerns. These concerns currently include wearing masks, social responsibility for others, and whether children go to school or workers return to work. This us versus them tribalism is reflected in our social media. Every human act, foible, error, statement or tendency — real, imagined or perceived — has become subject to instant social media support or scorn and mockery. The Cyber Jury Increasingly, the cyber jury of our peers either expresses fanatic agreement or disagreement with the views emerging over the Internet…
Sharing an article by one of our members: By Gerald S. Clay and Fletcher Knebel “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” – Vince Lombardi No American quotation so misrepresents the essence of modern life as that ascribed to the late Vincent Lombardi, coach of the Green Bay Packers, who purportedly tossed off the famous line about winning. The sole purpose of the game, the remark implied, was not the playing of it, but the winning of it. However pertinent the comment might be for professional sports—and even there it fails to reflect reality by a wide margin—as a metaphor for life, Lombardi’s enshrinement of victory is junk psychology. For every minute of our lives bent toward winning, we spend hours and days adjusting, accommodating and compromising. Most of society’s rituals, customs, and advisories on behavior serve to avoid rather than incite the struggles that result in winners and losers. Games and sports, as prevalent and popular as they are, belong to a world apart. Games take place in a highly artificial, structured environment. They have rigid rules designed to yield winners and losers in every contest. But life beyond games features elastic rules, limitless ambiguity, and wide areas where winning becomes irrelevant and the pursuit of victory seems ludicrous at best and perilous at worst. Short of war, modern life holds only restricted fields in which winning over losers is the goal. Games, both physical and mental, yes. Gambling, yes. Beauty, endurance, and muscle-bulging contests, yes. Running for political office should not belong to the same category as these—and yet, it is constantly framed as such. Elections as they currently exist are defined by the idea of winners and losers: we obsessively track candidates’ standing in polls and their ‘electability’ more than we interrogate their values and histories. The…
We would love to share your thoughts and help you network with peacebuilders in Hawaii at CRAHawaii.org website! If you are hosting an event relating to peacebuilding/conflict resolution, we would love to help you promote it. Please submit your event information at https://www.crahawaii.org/contact/. Conflict Resolution Alliance (CRA) members: If you have any articles you would like us to post or share at CRAHawaii.org, or presentation or workshop ideas to support peacebuilding/conflict resolution community in Hawaii, please submit it at https://www.crahawaii.org/contact/. Please contact us at info@crahawaii.org if you have any questions.
Public Policy Mediator Susan Podziba shared her wisdom on “Mediating Polarized Public Policy Disputes” at the William S. Richardson School of Law on February 12, 2020. One of her responses to a question left me with the impression that she had never before witnessed such extreme polarization in public policy disputes as in the last several years…it seemed that for some parties the truth no longer matters. She seemed to acknowledge added difficulties in mediating and facilitating resolutions in the current political environment. My daily readings about current events concurred with her description. I could not help but wonder why it might be so. Why don’t facts seem to matter anymore? Why doesn’t it seem to matter that outlandish lies are repeated over and over again and new ones proliferate incessantly? Why do conspiracy theories and fake stories seem to dominate the news? Why doesn’t science seem to matter? Jason Stanley’s book, “How Fascism Works,” gave me a deeper understanding of our current events. The lessons I got are best summarized in the book’s Introduction, excerpts of which are attached. If you are interested in facilitating public policy discussions, or in mediating public policy disputes, or if you simply want to know a bit more about what’s happening in present day politics, this is a must read book. The more we educate ourselves, the more we can use our skills and knowledge to work for a healthier society for all.
By Gerald S. Clay We are plagued by “default thinking” here in Hawaii and around the world. Over and above every curse which the human race has had to contend with, there is one curse that stands out above all others: the curse of wanting to be right. History has a dismal record of wars waged over the certainty that, “my religion is right”. The thought pattern is this: “If I am right, you cannot also be right.” So, “Because I am right, you need to think the way I think.” How many millions have been killed because of this line of reasoning? This need to be right is a “default thought pattern”. It is what we think automatically without thinking about it. This “default” has been ingrained in our automatic nervous system’s fight, flight or freeze response to perceived survival threats. Thankfully, over the last 40 years, a new thought pattern has emerged that promises better outcomes. This new thought pattern is based on thinking about “what is in my long-term best interest?” Or, even better, what needs do I have to address in order to make me feel more secure? I qualify “best interest” by acknowledging that the decision I choose must not only be in my and your long-term best interest, but must also satisfy my basic human need for security and safety. The Native American people believe that in making decisions now we must look ahead Seven Generations: how will present decisions impact the future interests and needs of my family, community, nation and planet? So, it may be in my short-term best interest to lie. I may score an advantage in an argument or I may get more money. However, lying can never be in my long-term best interest especially if my basic human needs…
By Tracey Wiltgen and Tom Mitrano Full story is posted at: https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/05/03/editorial/insight/tenants-feel-the-squeeze-socially-distant-mediation-can-aid-landlord-tenant/ With thousands of layoffs and furloughs, tenants are stretched to pay their rent, and property owners are worried about how they will pay their mortgage and other bills. If owners and tenants do not talk and work out payment plans, they may find themselves in bitter disputes frustrated by a back-logged eviction process now and then later when the stay-at-home moratorium is lifted. In response, the five mediation centers recently created a joint “Rapid Response Owner-Tenant Mediation Program.” Using videoconference, telephone or a secure online platform, an impartial mediator helps owners and tenants discuss options, such as payment plans, temporary rent reduction, deferred payments, and other creative solutions. The goal is finding a way for owners to receive some fair level of payment that also lets tenants stay at home. The incentive to compromise is clear: Making a plan, even a temporary one, can help relieve fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the future. The community mediation centers are providing the owner-tenant mediation services at no cost to the participants. Mediation cannot solve all problems. But even during a pandemic, mediators need to — and can — use safe, civil, and respectful ways to solve conflicts and take their services, socially distanced, directly to people who want these services, wherever they are.
The Ceeds of Peace Train is now live! We will match those who need digital, learning, and wellness resources with those who have them to spare in our beloved community. Please go to www.ceedsofpeace.org/covid-19-response and share the below with all you know to help us challenge resource inequity on our islands. Aloha!