This guide offers ideas to strengthen the community’s trust and responsiveness, help to prepare in advance for moments when conflict may escalate into crisis, to respond after conflicts arise (a checklist immediately below facilitates your using this guide in the midst of a divisive event), and to capture lessons from their response to community unrest and to plan proactively and collaboratively for future events. Each chapter of this guide outlines potential strategies and includes real world illustrations, tools leaders can use constructively during times of crisis and calm. A comprehensive checklist at the end provides a quick reference to key ideas. An appendix lists additional resources.

A planning process can be most effective before conflicts over symbols divide people into opposing camps. By working proactively, leaders and others within a campus, city, region, or state – what we call here for simplicity a “community” – will also respond more constructively and collaboratively when conflicts over symbols or other divisive incidents occur.

The guide offers practical ideas and illustrations for leading during campus conflict, including preparing ahead and acting during a crises. The guide covers assessments of the campus situation, communications, programming, and responding to large crowd events and hate incidents. The guide includes checklists and resources.

This guide provides process-oriented insights regarding communication and dispute resolution concepts that lay the foundation to enhance trust between law enforcement and the community, particularly in the immediate aftermath of a critical law enforcement action.

A checklist for students to extend support to other students while keeping the conversation constructive.

This guide covers threats to the guardrails in democracies around the world and offers dispute resolution-informed ideas for speaking out against weakening those guardrails.

This guide will help initiate and organize constructive conversations between polarized groups in a college or university environment. It applies only when the student groups are operating in good faith, but become bitterly divided over issues such as politics or policy.

This checklist offers ideas for students to have difficult conversations with other students when their political views differ.

This guide offers public officials practical ideas to plan and conduct initiatives that involve members of their community in designing ways to make their communities more resilient and fair.

Designed to simulate division on campus and tested at the Moritz College of Law, this simulation has been used with students and campus leaders from a number of universities. The simulation includes general facts, a facilitator guide for a full multi-hour simulation, a video of campus administrators engaging in the Springton University mini-simulation, as well as all confidential roles, “injects” and a corresponding PowerPoint. To request a copy of the simulation, email William Froehlich.

The checklist offers ideas for public officials and public boards to prepare ahead for situations in which volatile issues might lead to threats to their safety and that of their families.

A case study of what participants in a Divided Community Project three-day academy created to deal with conflict after returning to campus.