Divided Community Project

Divided Community Project

The Divided Community Project (DCP) provides dispute resolution and systems-design expertise to help local community and university leaders enhance community resiliency and prepare for and respond to events that polarize their communities.  Winner of the American Bar Association’s Cooley Lawyer as a Problem Solver Award, the project helps strengthen local capacity to transform division into collaboration and progress.

For materials connected to our #CampusBridge project, click https://go.osu.edu/campusbridge. 

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We live in extraordinary times: they are promising, yet contentious.  Feel free to use our Virtual Toolkit, just below, of guides, checklists, and even video interviews that might be helpful resources as you seek to help your community or university bridge differences.  Contact us directly if you think we might help.

Carl Smallwood
Executive Director, Divided Community Project

What We Do

The Divided Community Project offers resources, classes, and direct assistance to community and university leaders through several initiatives.

Speaking Out to Strengthen the Guardrails of Democracy

In Partnership with the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Divided Community Project has published the new guide Speaking Out to Strengthen the Guardrails of Democracy. 

Strengthening democracy requires a multi-pronged approach. The focus of this guide is on one prong – “speaking out” – as a strategy for strengthening democracy.

Take a look at the full guide: https://go.osu.edu/dcpdemocracy. 

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The Bridge Initiative at Moritz

DCP’s Bridge Initiative provides a distinguished panel of experienced former US Department of Justice Community Relations Service leaders/conciliators, police chiefs, and mediators to assist local leaders to address an emergent crisis or plan for dealing with community unrest and its underlying causes.

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National Project Leadership

The Project's national steering committee includes former CRS leadership (Grande Lum, Thomas Battles, Daphne Felten-Green, Becky Monroe, Ron Wakabayashi), law enforcement leadership (RaShall Brackney, Rick Myers), a former state Attorney General (Nancy Rogers), Dispute Resolution Faculty (Sarah Cole, Katrina Lee, Josh Stulberg), mediators of complex disputes (Susan Carpenter, Chris Carlson, Michael Lewis), community engagement experts (Sarah Rubin, Andrew Thomas), a social scientist studying dispute resolution (Craig McEwen), an expert on race and equity (Kyle Strickland), and an expert in transitional justice (Teri Murphy). 

Carl Smallwood is the Project's director. 

The photo was taken in January 2020 and includes Susan, Grande, Chris, Michael, Sarah, Becky, Bill Froehlich, Josh, Nancy, RaShall.

Resources for Leaders

The Divided Community Project’s Virtual Toolkit includes specific community engagement and conflict resolution strategies that local leaders and others can use to identify and address community division and its underlying causes.  We’ve categorized our guides, checklists, studies, video, and other resources under the following categories.

Are you ….