The Moritz College of Laws Divided Community Project routinely convenes with campus and community leaders to provide strategies for dispute resolution. Credit | Courtesy of The Divided Community Project
In a political era featuring presidential impeachments and election conspiracies, many local communities are left divided. However, a Buckeye program leads the reparation and preparation for political conflicts.
The Divided Community Project’s committee of experts in community leadership, social justice and conflict resolution provides guidance to universities and communities across the country on how to improve community resilience and respond to events that polarize communities, according to its website. The Divided Community Project was founded in 2015 by leaders in the Moritz College of Law, which is the top-ranked law program for dispute resolution by U.S. News and World.
A winner of the American Bar Association’s Cooley Lawyer as a Problem Solver Award and a recipient of Ohio State Outreach’s 2023 High Impact Program Award, The Divided Community Project founders included professor emeritus Josh Stulberg and former Ohio Attorney General and Professor Emeritus Nancy Rogers.
Rogers said her experience serving as Ohio attorney General fueled her desire to help local leaders manage community divisions constructively.
“I watched several city leaders respond to divisive situations as though they were the first leaders to face such a situation,” Rogers said. “Decisions that leaders make in the first hours of a crisis produce reactions that are difficult to change later. We wanted to give these leaders the benefit of learning first about experiences elsewhere.”
Carl Smallwood, executive director of the Divided Community Project, said the project began when the team gathered a group of dispute resolution experts, as well as municipal, advocacy group and faith leaders to look at what happened in the community of Sanford, Florida, after Trayvon Martin was shot and killed.
Martin’s death was followed by mass protests without any arrests or damage to the community. Smallwood said this was unlike Ferguson, Missouri, after the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014 that saw looting and burned businesses, according to the Associated Press.
“Looking through that lens of Sanford, they thought there were some lessons to be learned — and if those could be shared with community leaders, they might help communities become more resilient,” Smallwood said.
Over its eight-year history, Smallwood said the program’s initiatives have fallen roughly into three categories: publishing guidance, running intensive training sessions and real time assistance to communities.
The Divided Community Project’s published guidance includes a variety of resources available on the project’s website, including both a virtual toolkit aimed at various levels of university and municipal leadership and in-depth peer-reviewed research guides, Smallwood said.
“At a point in time when we had just entered a pandemic and were looking at an election process in the fall of 2020, we were finding communities that were divided not simply along racial lines, but also politically, socioeconomically, and any number of other ways,” Smallwood said. “Some of the tools that we’ve created are helpful to those communities at that time.”
Smallwood said the project’s most recent guide is titled “Speaking Out to Strengthen the Guardrails of Democracy,” a project in collaboration with the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.
“We live in a time that is polarized, and so the hope was that we’d be able to provide some tools that might be useful to community leaders in helping them address the division they might see within their communities, as well as some of the challenges to the institutions that help resolve those kinds of concerns,” Smallwood said.
Smallwood said additional guides have been published on race equity and community symbols.
“Part of our work was to address symbols, monuments, public spaces, statues, building names -– those sort of things that some communities are looking at and reassessing, and to try to provide a process to help communities that are dealing with those issues,” Smallwood said.
Smallwood said running training sessions — called academies — is an outgrowth of this type of guidance, in which a leadership group from college campuses or other communities come together for a 2 1/2-day training session.
Smallwood said during these sessions, the group first simulates a conflict and practices addressing it in real time. He said the project has hosted academies for university leaders, community leaders, and attorney generals from across the nation.
Rogers said although they have different key constituencies, “university leaders face divisions and challenges that resemble those facing local government and community leaders.”
“Both can work constructively in the midst of division only if they listen, involve, and stay in touch with constituencies beyond their leadership groups,” Rogers said.
In 2021, Smallwood said the project hosted an academy with a bipartisan group of attorney generals, as some governments looked to create a state-level counterpart to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service — an office that offers confidential conciliation services to local communities.
Smallwood said the third pillar of The Divided Community Project is known as the Bridge Initiative, which assists community leaders in dealing with crises and unrest. It’s made up of former members of the Community Relations Service, former law enforcement officials, former attorney generals, community mediators and faculty from Moritz.
Leaders from communities across the country can reach out to The Divided Community Project, and the Bridge Initiative team will tailor solutions for assisting that community with the division it is facing at no cost to the community, Smallwood said.
Smallwood said solutions are not always one-size-fits-all.
“We try to build capacity within the community that has the need so that they will be able to resolve future issues using local capacity,” Smallwood said. “We find that the wisdom to solve the community issues resides within the community — those are the folks both closest to the problem and closest to the conflict, but they’re also closest to the solutions.”
Rogers said she hopes the project will help other universities and public entities develop the capacity to reach out and provide communities with solutions.
“Requests for the project’s involvement have grown steadily as local leaders refer their colleagues in other cities or universities to the project,” Rogers said. “We can no longer respond positively to all of the requests for assistance, as much as we would like to.”
This story was updated on April 24, 2023, at 5:36 p.m. to accurately reflect the top-ranked law program for dispute resolution by U.S. News and World.
