CSCO Director Interview with KPOV Radio

Katharine Dalton speaking with KPOV Radio’s Carolyn Clontz about the important work that Community Solutions does in Central Oregon.

Good morning. Katherine. It’s great to be with you this morning.

Good morning. Thank you for having me. What a great opportunity, Carolyn.

Yes. Katherine Dalton, you are the executive director of a group that has been around for a long time. But people may not know. This group is called Community Solutions of Central Oregon. And give us some background about this group. First of all, like the longevity of what you’ve been doing and, and some of the effect that you’ve had. And then we’ll get into some details.

Well, we are actually one of the oldest nonprofits in Central Oregon that no one has heard of. So many of my calls, people go, I wish we had known you existed. We didn’t know you were here. It’s it’s it’s hard to get the word out because really, what we do in terms of we do mediation, it’s community mediation. And until you are in dire straits in the middle of conflict and so forth, you’re not looking for us. It’s not, you know, and it’s not something you hold galas and dinners and golf tournaments for. But we are a community resource. Mostly when people hear the word mediation, they only think of lawyers and so forth. But a little known fun fact is that mediation in the United States was embedded into the 1964 Civil Rights Act in an effort to address racial, ethnic, class and gender inequalities throughout the courts. So it has a long history of access to justice and community support and, you know, lower cost, non-litigious ways for people to get through difficult conversations and not escalate. So, yes, that’s what we do.

And I see, according to your web page, that you have served at least 17,000 people in these 25 years that you have been operating in Central Oregon.

Yes, yes we have. And a lot of that, a lot of that, you know, many, many times spent a lot of time doing intake calls. We’ll spend time with people who call in. It may not be something that is relevant or, you know, mediation is a possibility for it, but we are able to listen, give some support, give some referrals. We have a lot of community partners. Ben has really great resources. So very often it isn’t something that qualifies for mediation. But we we also do, you know, we have a lot of small businesses here in bend that do not have an HR department. Employee retention and finding employees in the first place. And employee retention has become incredibly important. And so we are able to handle some of these conversations where, you know, the management and the boss and the owner, they step out and it’s just us dealing, you know, talking with these employees who are not are not getting along and possibly causing friction. And, you know, the the small business owner really wants to keep both of these people, but they’re not skilled in communication, training and so forth. And they want that neutral party so the people can speak freely and not worry about their jobs. I know when you we’ve spoken a little bit before this and, you know, in terms of that 30 zero zero zero foot view, again, we we kind of cover anything that can be mediated. And if it’s not a one on one mediation where you’re looking for a mediated agreement, we do group facilitation. We I recently have done two different nonprofit board facilitations, because I have 30 years of nonprofit board experience just helping people get back on track and get going and do strategic planning. So it’s, you know, it’s kind of a soup to nuts. It’s all just helping people communicate and write well.

And I see on the section of your web page where it’s mediation, there are ten different categories of mediation alone that you do. So it it really does cover a very, very broad area of any kind of need that people have for help in communicating with each other and and getting on track, like you say, on the same page.

And it is. I mean, the problem is that people we we all avoid difficult conversations. You know, we’ve all seen that phone number come up on our phone, you know, the caller ID ego. Oh, brother, I haven’t paid that bill or whatever. We don’t pick up the phone, that kind of thing, when a lot of what we do is housing stability work. That’s through a couple different federal eviction program, Oregon Foreclosure Avoidance Program, the Manufactured and Marina Communities Resource Center. So we do that for people who live in manufactured housing communities. A lot of the time, what happens in landlord tenant is that they if if they would just communicate, things would be fine before that eviction notice gets slapped on the door. But you know, the tenant avoids it. And when I finally get people to the table, I hear over and over again so often from the landlords. They say, if you had just talked to me, we wouldn’t have come this far. But but it is hard. We don’t you know, a lot of people have so many other stressors in their life. They just avoid these conversations and then write, you know, a neighbor to neighbor. The biggest thing I think if you had to really drill down and say what community dispute resolution centers do. There’s there’s 14 of them here in Oregon that each have an area. And that’s under the Oregon Office for Community Dispute Resolution. Quite the mouthful. And that is under the Oregon School of Law, University School of Law. So we are all mandated by statute in terms of how what our training has to include and so forth. So if you were to if someone were to Google Oregon School of Law and look for community dispute resolution, they can find what center covers their area. And we’re all friends and we all help each other. And it’s it’s wonderful. And because all of us, depending on where you are. Some of us are more rural. Some of us are in Beaverton. Portland area. Very different group and needs and so forth. But you know, we’ve all got it covered between the, you know, among the 14.

Right.

Right. Central Oregon is its own thing. Sure.

And I would imagine that probably what people might think of first two are family issues like family court and dealing with divorce or parenting, custody, guardianship, estate planning, all of that stuff that maybe they might be referred to mediation through an attorney that they’re working with. Is that possible?

Definitely. And we have been doing a little bit of outreach to local attorneys. A lot of attorneys know mediation, but they do a different style. It’s called shuttle mediation, which is different. We do conference mediation where the two people are in the same room. And the the biggest in terms of what we aim to do is in, you know, the perfect model. is that the two people or the two parties come together. They come to a solution between the two of them. If you go to court, there’s a winner and a loser. You go in front of the judge, he gives you a couple of minutes each to say your side. He looks through the paperwork and then he makes a decision. And so you’ve lost all agency by the time you walk and sit in front of a judge. So we do pretrial small claims mediation for the court up in Redmond. And that very often means that they, you know, they people don’t even realize it at first, that they are actually learning communication skills. And it’s it’s downgrading the, you know, it’s when they have agency. So if you go in front of a judge and he hits the gavel. So John Smith, you actually do. Oh you know and James this $500 boom bam it’s over. If you had met mediation what maybe you came to maybe you only came to 350. You guys came to an agreement. Finally. What they have found is that the compliance rate with a mediated agreement. In that kind of situation, the compliance rate is in the 90% range, whereas when a judge hits the gavel and there’s a winner and a loser, you might have a civil, you know, you may have that small claims judgment, but you still have to go collect that. And yeah, you know, the disgruntled party that lost is not going to make that easy. So there’s really a lot to be said for people signing that thing. They had the conversation. We have surveys that we give out after our mediations and it’s a short one. But one of the questions is if you are in this type of conflict in the future, do you feel better equipped to handle it on your own? And again, those are way in the 90%. Yes, like they have learned some skills through a facilitator, through a mediation. They have learned some communication skills, which is the beauty of it. You’re practically, you know, giving people these skills that they can go forth and use and hopefully, you know, spread those around and, you know, not get in trouble.

Yes. Well, yes. And moving on to the facilitation, I have actually been a part of a strategic plan development in a, in a large group, and it was several different entities that were coming together. Actually, it was a school district and making a strategic plan, and it took days on end for us to do it. But it was so helpful to have somebody who knew how to guide us through that, how to get us all working together and figure out how we could make these strategic plans and come up with our problem solving and consensus building and that sort of thing. It it really was great, and I’m glad to see that you do that for different groups and and helping in whatever kind of group is looking for that sort of guidance.

Yeah, I think the bottom line with so much of this is people just need to be heard. Sometimes you’re in a mediation and one person definitely has a, you know, maybe a stronger case. We hate to use that word. And we’re, you know, we are neutral. And, you know, we’re not seeing them being judges. We’re not attorneys. We’re not, you know, counselors. But really, once they’ve been heard, they will sometimes just say, you know, at least I got heard. And and the other side has, has gotten to tell white what their needs and interests and so forth are. And it then they’re not they’re not they’re not carrying that burden. They you know, they don’t feel stomped on. They don’t you know, it kind of levels the power structure a little bit. Sure. And and it it helps.

It helps people feel like okay, I can agree to this. It’s not my exact language that I would have chosen, but it is something that, that I can work with and and be a part of. So that is so valuable because too often things can get to be pretty contentious. And so it’s, it’s and you know, I’m not just saying that about school districts, but any large group where you’re dealing with a lot of different pieces of that organization that are trying to work together. Well, you also do an education program, too, where you’re helping educate people about all these things that you do workshops and presentations and, and going into the schools and government offices. Boy, you just spread out completely among all different groups and levels in a community.

We try. We are building back capacity and expanding a lot more. Things slowed down during Covid because mediation is hard to do when you’re not in the same room with everybody adjusted, and there was a lot of mediation, but the in-person aspect is really very much more effective. When you sit in a room with somebody, everyone becomes humanized. Instead of the conflict being the big boogeyman, the bat, you know, the person you’re having a conflict with, whoever it is, whether it’s neighbor to neighbor or anything else. It’s become inflated in your mind and they’re just the bad person and, you know, causing you problems. And there’s that great equalizer of sitting in a room and just, okay, this this is a person that has their own issues and their own problems, and, you know, they need you to give them that deposit money back because their mother is sick in the hospital or whatever it is. You know, there’s all of those things. And so we do conflict resolution trainings. We are going to be doing more of those. We’ve got some hurdles to get through this summer, but in the fall, you know, we do free conflict management trainings that people can come into, you know, hour and a half, two hours, just basics. We’ve got we’ve got a lot of things that are in the hopper I’m trying to get down into. I’m we’re trying to go upstream a little bit and try to get to a younger population so that they’re learning communication skills way earlier, rather than sitting on their cell phones and social media. And, you know, bullying and things like that. They’re actually learning how to communicate and be leaders in of their groups and say, you know, this is right. Let’s sit down. Let’s, you know, this isn’t helping anybody.

And I think it’s powerful to have somebody in your own age group that is working through this with you, not an adult who you see as being an authority figure, but but an equal at your age? Well, I’m glad you brought up that, that topic of trainings, because to do all of this work, it takes a lot of people. And so you must have quite a cadre of people who are working to do all of these things that you have. So let’s look at that now.

Well, we are extremely blessed here in Central Oregon. Popular place to retire. We have really high skilled people who retire here and still want to give back. A lot of people from social services, a lot of people who are therapists and just other people who are just good people and want their community to be more peaceful. And, you know, they care about housing stability, access to justice and so forth, and they are willing to come and get this training. And we were up to 40 before Covid. We’re lower now, but they are amazing. And they give back to their community. Hours and hours and hours of volunteer work. The training is extensive, but they love it and they stick with us and they beg for cases when we get slow. They’re calling us. I mean, they are terrific people, but we can always use more because the more people I have, the more I can expand and do some of these things that we would really love to get going. Right.

And you just completed a training for this spring. And so you’ve added another group of people to those that are trained to do this. You have both basic and advanced training too. So once a person gets involved in this, they can start to specialize as well, couldn’t they? Correct.