I wanted to take some time to distance myself from our conflict-resolution program at the Boys and Girls Club of Georgetown so that my thoughts would be coherent and well thought out. Having taken that time, I do feel like I can look back at the program and deem it successful, something I could not even have imagined myself thinking after completing our final session on Tuesday, April 14.
I feel like taking some time to evaluate the program and the individual sessions allowed me to see that our central goal remained intact throughout the program and that some of the participants probably absorbed some small sliver of the things we were saying. To repeat the old adage, I feel that if we had a positive effect upon just one the participants' ways of dealing with conflict, then we must considers ourselves successful. There were many obstacles to completing the program, as well as the presence of unanticipated complications which caused the restructuring of the curriculum. The fact that things didn't really happen as planned only served to increase my appetite to participate in more civic engagement projects, as I feel that with a new group of children we would be able to learn from our mistakes and put on a better program. That's the thing about civic engagement: even though the program didn't achieve the ambitious goals we had set for it, it did serve to give us real-world experience and to illuminate the frustrations and the joys of civic engagement.
We had originally planned to conduct two sessions during the same week to introduce the participants to conflict resolution and to allow them time to understand the concepts behind the process before our third session, in which we had planned to take the participants to a ropes course. But, the third session fell apart due, basically, to lack of interest from the participants. Also, some amount of culpability lies with the Club's administration and their failure to emphasize the importance and rarity of opportunity of the event and to mobilize the participating kids to return parental release forms and make sure they showed up on the Saturday of the ropes course.
As our third meeting had to be canceled, the program was changed to four sessions rather than five, with the next club session concentrating on teamwork activities where the participants could utilize their conflict resolution skills to communicate effectively with their peers and reach the common goal of, in the case of the game Human Knot, undoing the "human knot" created by the crossing of their arms. Then, it seems that Daniel decided to sit in on the meeting and periodically stop the activity to interject with tidbits about how it emphasized aspects of peer mediation. What? Peer mediation? We hadn't yet spoken of peer mediation and now, we have all of 30 minutes during the next session, whose lesson plans have to be completely changed, to teach the participants (the number and individuals of which changed each session) how to, basically, act as authority in situations of conflict between others at the Club. So, during our final session we did this as well as we could while still using the same vocabulary as the first three sessions.
I do think that our program left its mark on the Club, whether it be through some of the kids simply thinking about what they say prior to speaking, or through the lessons learned by the administration about working with outside programs. I hope that this program not only served to teach the participants the message inherent in its name, but also to provide an interesting case study about interaction between volunteer programs presented by external sources and the Club itself.
Brady
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