Question:
What makes a good agreement at the end? Are you looking for something that is going to
establish a long-term change?
Answer:
A good agreement spells out what each party is going to do. It's important that each party
does something. That gets back to what I said earlier, acknowledging that the institution has
needs, as well as the community. So, even though the issues were originally raised by the
community, it's important that the agreement isn't just what the institution is going to do for the
community what they'll "cave in on," if you will. Both sides must make commitments about
what they're going to do. And it can't just be that they're going to be less racist or more
accessible, but the agreement must say how they are going to do that. It must set out some very
concrete steps. Now, in many cases the parties will want to have some long-term goals as well,
and that's fine. But you want some very specific steps of what each is going to do. You also need
to include some provisions for what they're going to do when the agreement either isn't working,
or when one party believes that their counterpart is not living up to the agreement. So, if is there
is a glitch and/or a problem with implementation, there should be some built-in procedure for
dealing with that. They must know how they can address that.
Question:
And what would that procedure likely be?
Answer:
Well, sometimes it is better on paper than it is in reality, but we try. Usually, the first step is
for the parties to talk to each other. If there is a commonly-respected resource in the community,
they might go to that resource to try to help work it out. Or they might ask CRS to come back and
meet with them again.
I can think of one case in which we had a wonderful agreement, but eventually one of the parties
just basically said, "We don't want to do this anymore." The other party was very frustrated, of
course, and that was an agreement which included a provision that either party could go back to
CRS to assist. But the first party refused to meet; they completely refused to talk about it, even
after the agreement had worked well for eight years. So it does happen. But I do try to at least
include some provisions for that, so that parties know what will happen if it doesn't work.
The other thing is that the final agreement may be written in fairly formal legal terms, especially
if there are lawyers at the table. I don't try to make the agreement sound like a legal document
we try to forget the word "whereas," for instance, at the beginning but some parties may feel
that it sounds more authentic that way. This is most often true if both parties have lawyers at the
table. I don't think agreements need to sound like legalese to be effective, but again, that's just a
personal preference.
