Third Side Forum

3S Questions – Two Boards,Two Agendas, Zero Unity Torpedo Wake

The Wake County Public School System in Raleigh North Carolina is facing enormous tension between the school board and the city commissioners responsible for allocating the funds to the schools. A lot of time and effort is spent in this inherent battle that occurs every spring. Here are some articles on this issue.

Two boards, two agendas, zero unity torpedo Wake schools 

A cafeteria of ideas for building schools without raising property taxes 

Wake Officials Debate Year-Round Schools

What Third Side Question would you pose to help transform this issue?

All posted questions will be sent to the Wake County School Board and the City Commissioners to support their work to transform this issue.  For more information on 3S Questions - visit the Third Side Tools.

Challenges of Holding the Third Side

From Josh Weiss
Boston MA

A recent Boston Globe article describes a series of disputes and rivalries that has shattered the alliance of the powerful black Boston ministers who founded the Boston Ten Point Coalition in 1992 and took to the streets to combat, face-to-face, an unprecedented wave of youth  homicides.

Article: A Shattered Alliance  By Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff  |  February 14, 2006

Here are some excerpts from the article:

In 1992, a band of black ministers united and launched an unprecedented effort to fight youth crime. Now three of those leaders barely speak to one another.

The breaking point came for the Rev. Jeffrey Brown at a meeting of black ministers at Peoples Baptist Church in Roxbury in summer 2004, when youth workers employed by the Rev. Eugene Rivers asked Brown to step outside.

One of Rivers's workers physically threatened him on orders from Rivers, Brown said in a recent interview. 

Rivers told the Globe there were no threats, only ''misunderstandings," but the youth worker and Hammond both corroborated Brown's account.

When the approach began to bear fruit in the 1990s, Wall said in his office at Dorchester Temple Baptist Church, in Codman Square, ''all of a sudden people [outside the coalition] were saying, 'Something worked!' and a lot of attention, a lot of money came in. . . . When the money
started to come in, when the media began choosing who to highlight,  those relationships began to break."

Rivers's willingness to speak bluntly and critically of black society's  internal problems, his early advocacy of faith-based initiatives, and his knack of attracting media attention frequently made him the face of the clergy's fight against crime.

That left many other pastors from the more than 40 churches that joined the original coalition hungering for money and recognition,  according to politicians, clergy, and law-enforcement officials.

As a result, rivalry spread far beyond the top leaders.

In the beginning, ''we all were in it together," Wall said. Minister Don Muhammad of the Nation of Islam was in the leadership group, he pointed out. ''We had great collaboration," Wall said. ''We needed each other."

The ministers are not able to work on youth violence now in the way they did in the 1990s, but each is still at it, and that is what counts, says the Rev. Charles Stith, former pastor of Union United Methodist Church in the South End.

What are the challenges of sustaining the third side and how do we support thirdsiders over time?

Anti-Hate Program becomes Active Third Side in Montana Community

Adapted from PBS POV website

The Working Group has been helping local communities deal with intolerance and violence by holding film screenings and community discussions. When film maker Patrice O'Neill and crew got to Kalispell Montana, however, they realized they had landed in the midst of a conflict too complex to be comprehended, much less soothed, by a few community meetings.

Green swastikas were burned to protest environmental laws. A radio talk show host regularly called for the "eradication" of "green slime" while broadcasting the addresses of local environmental activists. Lug nuts were loosened on a car belonging to an anti-hate campaigner's daughter. While loggers and mill workers were facing lost jobs and rising living costs, right-wing extremists plied them with racist and anti-government rhetoric. Most ominously — in news that flashed across the nation and even around the world — a shadowy terror group called Project 7 was discovered with a cache of arms and a hit list of local government officials, police officers and their families.

It was the unmistakably rising tension in the town that led ex-police officer Brenda Kitterman to invite The Working Group to bring its grassroots anti-hate program, Not in Our Town, to Flathead Valley.

The Working Group ended up staying two years, earning the trust — or at least the willingness to speak candidly on camera — of antagonists on all sides of the Flathead Valley land wars, while documenting the valley's increasingly tense web of conflict, intimidation and public invective. From the outset, the filmmakers show they are not "strike a match" documentary makers. Far from heating up the action for dramatic effect, the filmmakers aim for the drama of a community seeking to restore its sense of kinship in the face of mounting stresses from within and without. In "The Fire Next Time," they appear to have crafted the rare documentary that widens communication — with signal exceptions — between declared enemies.  The documentary seeks to find out how the contentiousness in the Flathead Valley could take such a bitter and destructive turn — and once taken, how a community can marshal the will to pull itself back.

Dictionary Supports Columbian Journalists Reporting Conflict

Colombian journalists had stopped calling things by their real names for fear of threats, abductions or even death. For this reason, the the Medios Para la Paz publishes a dictionary covering terms and topics related to resolving peace and conflict as a tool to defend the accuracy and precision of the information in the face of pressure.

“Have we as journalists become one more actor in the armed conflict that has stricken our country for more than half a century?” and “Can we, with words, with our reports about the war, contribute to the establishment of favorable conditions for peace?   These were two questions that back in 1997 gathered a handful of senior reporters in Columbia.  It was of absolute necessity that they did something witnessing the rapid and increased degradation of both, war and journalism.

Eduardo Márquez, co-founder and trainer for Medios para la Paz desribes the focus on the development of the dictionary.

“But we did not settle with being simply death notaries in a country where intolerance and the negative to allow a different point of view, have consolidated as the most common and well known means for “solving” conflicts. Neither do we find convenient for our fragile democracy, the recent professional routines of many important media organizations with a tendency to convert the reporter into some kind of worker incited by disproportionate commercial interest.

And so, in a town near Bogotá, with the guidance of Javier Darío Restrepo and Gloria Moreno, when we were about thirty representing two generations of reporters, we got together to analyze a series of articles about war published in national newspapers.

During two days, we untangled the traps within the language connotations, the unbalanced consultation of sources, the distortions introduced by editors in sensationalistic headlines or in the lead, and the mistakes made due to the pressure of deadlines… mistakes committed when time doesn’t allow reflection and these errors feed upon accumulated knowledge and our scale of ideological, political, or religious values, or perspectives on social classes, race or sex.

Most of the articles had been written by irreproachable journalists filled with good intentions and they were in favor of a negotiated solution to our tragic warfare. This concerned us even more, because it indicated there were more professional practices interiorized in newsdesks and were considered to be correct.

Meanwhile, we touched up the new tool aimed at distinguishing the language journalists use from the language of their sources: The Dictionary of Terms of Conflict and Peace, To Disarm the Word. More than 500 terms defined accordingly to the International Human Right, the National Constitution and other codes.

It’s inevitable to remember a comment made by a journalist from Magangué – region with paramilitary influence, after attending a workshop held in Cartagena and with the dictionary in his hand he said: “I didn’t know that the language I used spontaneously could identify me with one group and make me become a target to another group.” Or another journalist of a radio station in south of Tolima, zone of historic presence of FARC, confessed: “Before I publish any article related to issues on law and order or judicial news, I always review with the dictionary of Medios para la Paz. That way, in addition to doing what’s right, I avoid having trouble with guerrilla or with the military.””

Feb 28 - Reflections and Dialogue

In our Forum mailing we posted the following two Third Side News Stories.

To deal with Hamas, Israel might consider NGOs
A commentary exploring the third side role the NGOs could play representing civil society to support the Israeli and Palestinian governments and ease the lives of both peoples.

Study circle coordinator lends an ear to her community
In Kuna Idaho Arnette Johnson and community members meeting together and listening to each other through Study Circles has made a difference. In the past seven years, Kuna’s Study Circles have discussed important issues such as creating a comprehensive plan for growth, education concerns, encouraging area business growth, and meeting critical infrastructure needs.

Please share any thoughts or comments.

Consistent focus

The pursuit of peace and progress cannot end in a few years in either victory or defeat. The pursuit of peace and progress, with its trials and errors, its successes and setbacks, can never be relaxed and never abandoned. -- Dag Hammarskjold

3S Questions – Skateboarders in Tucson struggle to keep vision alive

Skateboarders and the City of Tucson are trying to resolve a cost hike in a planned skate park. Proposed solutions are discouraging the youth who designed and will ride the park in the future. Here is an article about the latest proposal and some of the tension this community is faced with.

Modular skate park is one horrible idea, say area enthusiasts

What Third Side Question would you pose to help transform this issue?

All posted questions will be sent to Demorotski,and the City of Tuscon officials to support their work to transform this issue.  For more information on 3S Questions - visit the Third Side Tools.

Connecting and Expanding the Third Side Network

With the Third Side Forum functional it's time to reach out and expand and connect this forum to other third siders and networks. We’d love your thoughts and ideas of websites, blogs, networks and communities that are natural connections. 

Our hope is to provide a space and bridge for communities, practitioners and students to meet and weave a web of inquiry, knowledge and experience developing a community of support for the development and mobilization of Third Side perspective and expanding our ability to face and transform conflict together. 

What recommendations do you have for our development of this network and forum?

Peace in the House

Adapted from Minnesota Public Radio

David Harris has travelled extensively through the Middle East and North Africa studying Sephardic music. He says on his travels he heard stories he never saw in the headline.

"One of the things I find frustrating is that when you read the newspaper or listen to the radio, the same story gets told over and over these days: 'relentless ancient conflict reignited!'" says Harris. "There's actually a much more complicated more interesting story - there's a history of co-existence that isn't just about people getting along but it's about great cultural flowerings!"

Harris is the artistic director of Voices of Sepharad, a group that specializes in the music of Sephardic Jews. Following their expulsion from Spain in 1492, Sephardic Jews migrated throughout the Arab world. Harris says for years they lived side-by-side with Christian Arabs and Muslim Persians. He says in times of peace, rich music, literature and philosophy has come out of those same regions that are now in conflict.

Harris and his company are performing in Minneapolis Peace in the House about dealing with conflict and communicating across assumed cultural barriers.  Peace in the House begins with the creation of the world, threads through medieval Spain and the post-expulsion times when Jews and Arabs lived together in the Middle East and North Africa, and ends with the lives of the performers onstage.

David Harris says for peace to be possible, people need to be able to visualize it, to know that it has existed - and persisted - in the past. The members of his company are a microcosm of the complexity and diversity within Sephardic culture. They encompass, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and while they all now live in the Twin Cities, they hail from Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Jordan and India. They dance and sing on stage to the same music, the same rhythms, each with their own particular cultural stylings.

OSU’s peer mediation center informs students about mediation through comedy

Students at Oregon State University may not be aware of the Peer Mediation Center, so the center showcased their services with their “Mediation Madness” comedy night tonight. Where students can watch and participate in an improv act of peer mediation.  “If you’ve seen Whose Line Is It Anyway?, it’s like that,” said Crystal Livingston, a senior in history and Peer Mediation Center coordinator.  The audience gets to choose names for the actors, the issue, and watch four people acting as two mediators and two participants. The audience will watch the issue through all stages of mediation and participate throughout, and then they can submit two possible solutions to the issue.   Livingston said the idea came up in a promotions committee meeting when they tried to think of a way to make a mock mediation attract students.