Helping Your Community

Tarrant County Dispute Resolution Program (DRP) believes we need to expand the concepts and availability of conflict resolution to our communities. We need to find better ways to communicate with each other and resolve conflicts.  DRP is in the process of training a diverse group of volunteer mediators to take these skills back out into our neighborhoods, workplaces, schools and communities.  Our vision is to form a group of community facilitators who will create momentum and a movement towards better problem solving.

Community mediation offers constructive processes for resolving differences and conflicts between individuals, groups, and organizations. These processes are an alternative to avoidance, destructive confrontation, prolonged litigation or violence. Community mediation is designed to preserve individual interests while strengthening relationships and building connections between people and groups, and to re-create systems that make communities work for all of us.

In community mediation, a mediator facilitates a process which assists the participants through difficult conversations, providing a safe environment to discuss their conflict.  These processes vary depending on the needs of the disputants.  In community mediation, the decision-making authority rests with those in the conflict and most impacted by the conflict. 

DRP’s goal is to support the maintenance and growth of community-based mediation programs and processes, and to encourage the development and sharing of resources for these efforts.