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Did the parties assist in the goal-setting process or influence your choice of goals? How?
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Efrain Martinez
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Generally, I ask them what they think needs
to be done about the problem. So, quickly we turn from a
complaint phase into a resolution phase. Also, do they
personally want to be a part of the solution process? Some say,
"Yes, let me know what you need from me. I'll be there." Some
will say, "I'll tell you everything you ever need to know, but
don't invite me to be anywhere. Politically it's not safe for me
to be there." They tell us who we need to talk to in the
leadership, and tell us about the behind the scenes people.
Efrain Martinez
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Going
back for a minute, when you're designing the process, do you get
them involved in process design and ground rules, or do you do
that yourself?
Answer:
We negotiate with them one-to-one and make sure everybody
understands. We discuss and develop the ground rules at the
start of the formal meeting. We help them decide how these
meetings are going to run. They already know they have to
respect each other, but now they have to commit to each other face-to-face.
Question:
Is there kind of a standard structure you use where each side lays
out their needs and then lays out solutions?
Answer:
They lead themselves to that. Like in this situation with the
fishermen, it wasn't that formal. But some other situations are
very formal. For example, there's a town in Texas where
police action caused a lot of disruption and the community had
allegations of police brutality. I had worked with that chief
before in a previous situation, and so he asked me to come and
help. I had the chief's support, but the newspaper reported that he
had asked me for help. So then it was assumed I must be aligned
with the chief and competing against the minority community.
Again we helped them to analyze their situation. They wanted an investigation
by black F.B.I. officers, and of course they were going to write
to the attorney general for this F.B.I. investigation. I explained
to them that there were some benefits through my process that
they would not get with the others processes. They could always exercise those options, they
could file a civil suit against the city, which they did, they
could ask the Attorney General to investigate, which they did,
they could picket and holler and scream, and they did that too.
Or, they could use my process, mediation. Then we analyzed the
situation with them. Their attorney was advising the community people not to talk
to the police or the investigators. This caused a problem
because the police could not investigate through internal
affairs, and the chief thought the police were being set up. I told
the community, "I will write a letter to the Attorney General,
once it filters through the process, it's going to take maybe a
week or two. Then they'll assign it to a local F.B.I. agency so
then about two months from now you'll have an F.B.I. agent over
here. They'll take another month and a half to do the
investigation, then it will go back to the civil rights
division." I always tell them what the process is, because they
may not be familiar with it.
Ozell Sutton
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Question:
So you had different goals for each group?
Answer:
You see, it's their goals. You try to assist them and facilitate in their
goals without being harassed, beaten or these kinds of things. So you try to get police to
conduct themselves in a way that will not interfere with the people's right to address their
issues and to redress those issues. You go around with an all-American notion that a person
has a right to redress and protest if he or she decides to do so, and you don't have a right to go
around preventing them from doing that, as long as they're doing it legally. But the
establishment made it impossible to do it legally by restricting the streets and not letting them
march when they wanted to march. So I'll provoke them and I'll just stand there when you get
in a major march. The core of the marchers are committed people, but not everybody there is
particularly committed to non-violence. Don't fool yourself about that. Most of them would
commit to non-violence as long as there's not too much provocation. Then, when too much
provocation comes, one man said to somebody "hit me now." We'll see how non-violent he is.
So someone starts and then the fight's on.
Will Reed
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Did you ever negotiate your role with the parties? Did you
determine your role yourself or did you work with them to determine what role you would play?
Answer:
That's a good question. It would depend on the parties. If there were parties who were
sophisticated
enough to want to discuss with you your role and how to advance your role or improve your role
or how to
play down your role or whatever, then you'd do that. They were a pretty sophisticated lot.
And every now and then, you had a leader in a certain group that you
respected enough that you could do that with. Like Alice, we got to know each other, so we'd sit
down and she'd say, "Why don't' you play the big, good guy and I'll play the old bitch." She was
good at
saying that. Well, it got down to times when there were people over the years that you worked
with a lot,
and you got to know that you could trust them and they were easy to cooperate with. You knew
they were
going to do the right thing. And if they felt you were going to do the right thing, things went
pretty
easily.
Silke Hansen
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Did that help shape what your ultimate goals were toward the mediation process? You were able to hear what their various interests were, did that help shape what your goals were?
Answer:
Oh, I don't have any goals. That's a trick question isn't it? I am only being partly facetious in this. Seriously I think our goal is to help those parties reach agreement, and more importantly, to create or form a relationship which is going to continue beyond the agreement. I can honestly say that we didn't have our own goals of what we were hoping one side or the other would do. I think almost inevitably in a mediation case, and I am not talking about this one, but in a more long, drawn out mediation, I find myself fluctuating between this side being so reasonable and that side being so obstinate and then that changes. So on any given day, I might have favored "one side" and wished that the other side saw that. But that changes, it doesn't remain consistent through the mediation process. To me, that's just a verification of the fact that I don't have a specific agenda of what I want the agreement to look like. I might have some ideas of what might work, but even if I do, I am very, very careful to inject that in a way nobody will be too influenced. When the agreement is signed, it is very, very important for them to see that it's their agreement. I don't mind them thinking that Hanson helped them reach that agreement, but it's got to be their agreement.
Martin Walsh
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
We
ended up with goals in the agreement. They were worked out by the administration and the
students looking at the numbers. It was pegged to the high school student population graduating
in Massachusetts. I think they originally asked for thirty percent and the agreement was, once
they worked through the numbers, twenty percent.
Stephen Thom
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
The town council heard the concerns from you for the first
time?
Answer:
There had been enough writing and enough information. They knew generally what the
issues were, but they didn't know exactly what all the detailed points that the tribe was going to
ask of them. Once we got those from the tribal council, we were able to convey them to the town
council. And there was concurrence that they would meet and discuss them.
Question:
Did you filter or launder those issues to make them palatable to the town council?
Answer:
We write them pretty much as they are conveyed to us. There wasn't any objection to it by
the town council, but usually they are written in the language and from the perspective of the
complainant. That was the way the issues were conveyed, that was the way it was brought to
their attention and they decided to go with it. They didn't express any reluctance.
| Martin Walsh
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Do you influence what goes on the agendas? You mentioned one
example where people forgot to put an overriding issue on an agenda. Do you help them shape
the agenda?
Answer:
Well, most cases I'd say, you might use the terminology of coaching, but I think it's more a
sense of feeding back to them what you heard in the assessment process. Sometimes they haven't
done this before, so it's a matter of clarifying the issues.
Stephen Thom
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
We
had a list of issues that we anticipated the Native Americans would ask, and a couple of things
that had already come up. One, they wanted all of the remains. They wanted them to be buried
in a certain location, and they wanted that location to be concealed. Two, they wanted to identify
any of the artifacts that were related to what they called funerary objects to be returned with those
remains, and to be tracked, and to go through and contact the professors to see whether anybody
had, unintentionally or intentionally, borrowed any of the artifacts. So those were some of the
types of demands or requests -- that would be brought to the table for discussions.
So, what I normally do is, we get a list of those issues that
the complainant has, and in this case we would consider the Ohlone People the complainant. We
shared that list with the institution, and said, "Is they're anything that is not negotiable on their
list of issues and do you have any additions to make?" There was an additional issue that the
institution made because some 200 remains were not available because they were on loan to
another institution. They had loaned them for study by another school, which they didn't
remember until later. At some point later we got consensus and agreement on a list which served
as the agenda when we came to the table. We structured this so that
we had five to six representatives for the Ohlone and three from the Institution. All of the
families had a representative at the table. But they wanted their elders there, because they have
to consult with their elders on spiritual matters. This is a typical situation in a lot of Native
American cases -- the elders make the calls, but they don't come to the table; they send the young
people to represent them. So we had to negotiate some of the logistics in terms of the Institution
understanding why the representatives would be going to their elders to have caucuses to allow
for clearance of some of the issues as we go through the mediation process. That was all
concurred in by the parties before we came to the table.
| Angel Alderete
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
When we took our material to the director,
he only changed one thing. We wanted to have a corps of experts stationed somewhere
strategically within the state, so that in the event of problems, they could go anywhere and
respond with maybe one or two people immediately. We could visit the area, assess it, and then
come back to the group and say, "Here's what's happening, here's what I think we need, here's the
view of the warden. The staff is okay, or they're not okay." This kind of thing. We also talked
about developing the team, what it was that we would need, including the use of other staff
people that weren't part of the team. At the time, we envisioned a team of about sixteen people.
But the director didn't like that idea. He thought that each institution ought to have its own
specialist, and then based on the need, we ought to start bringing more people in. We felt this
really wasn't the
better of the two approaches, but since it was his thing, we said, "Okay, fine. We'll do it that
way." When my warden friend and I talked about it, we never did say, "If this doesn't work,
what do we fall back to?" We just said, "We want to go for that." When it wasn't what he
wanted, and he presented us with the fall-back, we agreed to go for it.
Angel
Alderete
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
We also had women in the institution, and the warden's thought, not mine, was that
women are more apt than males to be receptive to inmates' concerns. The
reason for this is that male correctional workers tend to immediately pose themselves as, "I'm not
going to
talk to you as an equal. I'm going to talk to you as my unequal and it's up to you to bring
yourself up to my level." The women don't do this. The women say, "What do you want to say?
Okay, let's hear it. All right, fine, fine. I'll see what I can do about it, and I'll come back to you."
And that's the end of the conversation. But she would go back, she'd get things done and would
come back with either a yes or a no, either I can't or I can. Whereas a guy would say, "I don't
agree with that," right off the bat. So that was the warden's keen sense. He was able to not
only see it, but then say it.
Leo Cardenas
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
How would you
determine what your role would be in any case? Did the parties involved shape your role or did
you already come in and say, "I am conciliator," or, "I am mediator," or, "I am regional
director?"
Answer:
I think it's a combination of everything that's in the scene, including its history, its
leadership, the timing of it, the type of response, and resources. Clearly, when a dispute has
occurred publicly and words have been exchanged, people are not talking to each other. People
already feel that they are in a corner and that they're fighting back, so they're almost like a caged
animal. They're clawing rather than listening or reasoning. So we come in and begin to talk to
them about how they got inside that cage in the first place, and how we can get them out of there.
Then the venting happens. They're venting with us and against us. If we're meeting with a
Hispanic group, and they're angry, it doesn't matter to them that I'm a Hispanic. But sometimes
I'm able to use certain words and phrases and I'll intermix English and Spanish. This will
sometimes bring down the tensions and bring some humor to the situation. So they'll vent all of
this stuff in various emotions, and we want them to do that. Once they go through that process,
then we can begin to talk. "Well, what type of issues do you have?" And before you know it,
"Here. Here's this paper, here's this letter, here's a history. Remember I was talking about this
and that?" And the venting is out of the picture and they begin to think in a different way, begin
to put it in a different perspective. All we've done is sit down and listen and hopefully asked the
right questions to begin to move. The eventual question is, "How can I help you? If I go and
meet with the school superintendent, what can I tell them?"
Werner Petterson
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Question:
Let me back up a second, how did
you determine what your role would be and how was that influenced by the parties?
Answer:
This case was I don't know how many years old. It had been hanging around the courts
probably for 12 years or more so there was a lot of history there. Things going nowhere and
people fighting back-and-forth in the courts about it and nothing happening. But I think the four
people that came together in this negotiating team, two from the plaintiffs and two from the
defendants, just clicked and there was not a lot of mistrust. I think they were really sincerely
interested in working with each other and felt that they were all sincerely committed to finding a
solution.
Manuel Salinas
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
No. Because when we approached them, we mentioned to them
we did conciliation work and mediation work, and our sole purpose was to assist them to reach
whatever goals they desired and that perhaps we could assist them with the resources we had to
reach those goals, not knowing what their goals were. We had no idea.
Question:
And it sounds like you're saying they didn't quite know either what their goals would
eventually be.
Answer:
Not at that time, no.
Will Reed
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Did you ever sit down with the party to help
you figure out
what your strategy would be, or was this solely with other CRS workers?
Answer:
No. It depended on what you thought the situation might be -- who you could trust. People
you could
work with. Sometimes you developed strategy with
somebody that
wasn't part of the agency but who might have been, for example, another agency, a sister agency,
contemporaries or what have you. You might find yourself developing some strategy with the
police
department. You might find yourself discussing strategy with a community action director. You
might find
yourself discussing strategy with anybody that you felt fit into the scheme of things to the point
where they
could make a contribution and where you were comfortable with their input. And that happens
lots of
times when you are in the field. Especially if you are out there and you are by yourself. And if
you're by
yourself, you're trying to figure out who you're going to work with. Who's amicable to this
situation?
Who's hostile to the situation?
Dick Salem
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
Answer:
The inmates were really effective and
articulate in expressing the problems and helping come up with ideas. They are creative and
intelligent guys, as intelligent as anyone else in the room. They just took another path in their
life.
| Nancy Ferrell
[Full Interview] [Topic Top]
The Native Americans were the most
resistant in that they don't verbalize their problems much, and you have to really spend time with
them. So they were a player, but they weren't as significantly involved as the black and Hispanic
students were.
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