The mission of the Kitsap County Dispute Resolution Center is to strengthen relationships within families and communities through mediation, facilitation, and training. Read more about the presentation by Executive Director, Mary Hancock.
"To strengthen relationships within families and communities through mediation, facilitation, and training." That is the mission of the Kitsap County Dispute Resolution Center, the subject of a presentation to the Kingston North Kitsap Rotary Club at its noon meeting Mar 9. Mary Hancock, the Center's Executive Director told Rotarians the Center was launched in 1990 by local attorneys who had been involved in dispute resolution, much of which involved children.
The Center is active in domestic violence disputes as representatives of the children involved. It is involved in divorce, business, family, and land use disputes. Their mediation training is to develop communication skills, helping to ask questions, and to listen, to hear. "Often what we think is happening is not what is happening," said Hancock. The job of Dispute Resolution Center mediations is not to provide solutions. It is to help the participants arrive at solutions.
Kitsap County Dispute Resolution Center is one of twenty-one such centers in the state, which have formed an association called Resolution Washington. That Association works with the legislature to promote programs for common problems in the state, such as foreclosures. "Working with banks and homeowners we have saved the homes of many Washingtonians," Hancock told Rotarians.
The basic building block is a forty hour mediation class. The DRC also conducts continuing training. The organization does charge fees based on the ability of clients to pay. Often their service is free.