University of Oregon office launches training program for Spanish-speaking mediators

The Oregon Office for Community Dispute Resolution supports 12 centers across the state where trained mediators help community members settle disagreements before they go to court. Housed within the University of Oregon law school, the office also provides the basic training needed to begin the process of becoming a court-appointed mediator. It recently offered its first series of trainings entirely in Spanish, in what might be the first program of its kind in the country.

Veronica Bañuelos led the workshops and Gabriela Buamscha participated in them. They both join us, along with OOCDR Administrator Patrick Sponsler, to talk about the need for Spanish-speaking mediators in Oregon.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Oregon Office for Community Dispute Resolution supports 12 centers across the state where trained mediators help community members settle disagreements before they go to court. The office is housed within the University of Oregon’s Law School. It also provides the basic training needed to begin the process of becoming a court appointed mediator. It recently offered its first series of trainings entirely in Spanish, in what might be the first program of its kind in the country. Veronica Bañuelos led the workshops. She is the founder and principal consultant at her own consulting firm. Gabriela Buamscha participated in them. She is the president of Lanin Iman, a natural resource consultancy. They both join us now, along with Patrick Sponsler. He is the administrator of the Oregon Office for Community Dispute Resolution. It’s great to have all three of you on Think Out Loud.

Veronica Bañuelos: Thank you, David.

Gabriela Buamscha: It’s good to be here.

Patrick Sponsler: A pleasure to be here.

Miller: Patrick Sponsler, first. We should maybe start with the basics. What is your definition of mediation?

Sponsler: Yeah. Thank you. Well, very broadly, mediation is where people bring in a third party to help them negotiate their differences and find resolution. It’s a process that can be used in disputes with two individual parties on small matters. But it’s also a process that can be used in disputes involving dozens of organizations and millions of dollars at stake.

Miller: And at what level does your office mainly focus its efforts in terms of helping mediators?

Sponsler: As the name suggests, we operate in the field of community mediation. There’s multiple levels of mediation and so we help folks that are kind of the day-to-day aspects that impact their lives. And I like to think of community mediation as an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for individuals, groups and organizations to create their own solutions and retain decision-making authority, while holding people accountable for their actions before those disputes escalate into going through the court system.

Miller: What are the kinds of disputes or conflicts that might fall under that umbrella?

Sponsler: Yeah, like I say, it’s those disputes that impact community members’ day-to-day lives. There’s housing matters such as eviction cases. There’s living agreements that mediators work in, in support with programs such as second home or home share programs. They do family reunification plans and they work with youth and adult restorative justice programs, partnerships with school, juvenile centers, DA offices and classic cases of neighbor-to-neighbor disputes, [like] barking dogs, fence lines and other disputes like that. But then they also do some statewide programming such as the USDA Agricultural Mediation Program, the Oregon Foreclosure Avoidance Program. And they support the Marina and Manufacture Dwelling Program out of OHCS.

Miller: Veronica Bañuelos, what first drew you to conflict resolution, to mediation?

Bañuelos: Yeah, thanks for the question. There’s so many different things that drew me to this. And it’s hard for me to talk about this without mentioning that I’m also a spiritual director and just as a practitioner of systems and equity and sort of this foundational sort of lens as a spiritual director. To me, there is something that just drew all of these different lenses that points to the same thing, which is resolution and sort of contradiction to all of the things that separate us, which is connection, right? Connection through all of these different lenses, particularly around systems. And to me…

Miller: I hate to interrupt, but since you said it’s so central to your understanding of your work being a spiritual director, I have to be honest, I don’t think I know what that means.

Bañuelos: Oh, OK. So the easiest way that I’ve found to explain it is, you go to the doctor when you’re sick, you need some attention, your body needs attention. Some folks, some of us, have a spiritual lens in our lives. So for those folks, we go to people who have that lens and sort of try to make meaning of their lives. And that’s pretty much, in a nutshell, what a spiritual director does. [They] help you figure things out in your life, just like a counselor would be more [for] mental health. And spiritual direction is just another layer of who we are as human beings, whether you practice that or not. Does that make sense?

Miller: It does. And for you, it seems like it is intimately tied to your work in mediation.

Bañuelos: Absolutely. To me, I’ve always felt this calling of like, OK, I’m a problem-solver and I need to figure out what are the intersections of systems thinking, equity work. And what is the solution? And to me, one of the things that I have found out is to contradict any of the things that get in the way, is to do the opposite. Like how do we contradict oppression? We connect, right? So if the job of racism is to separate races or people by race, then we need to do the opposite. How do we do that? By finding ways towards each other through mediation, through systems lenses, through context, putting people in context, putting conflicts into context.

Miller: Gabriela Buamscha, you’re trained as a biologist and as a soil scientist. How did you get involved in mediation work?

Buamscha: That’s a good question. Thank you. Scientists need to be good communicators. And I got interested in conflict resolution when I started my first job because there’s conflict in the workplace daily, right? And if we cannot learn to address it in a healthy way, it really can ruin people’s lives and organizations. I’ve been, for more than 20 years, a team facilitator, which is within the range of conflict resolution. But facilitators in meetings, in the workplace, we run meetings and agendas and timelines and deadlines, and we work around conflicts that come out, but we don’t really address it. So I knew about mediation and as a possibility of one way to address and maybe solve or begin to solve the conflict. And finally, last year, I was able to take my first class in English.

Miller: Well, let’s turn then directly to the big reason that we’re talking with all three of you, which is this decision to offer these classes now in Spanish. Patrick Sponsler, what was the idea behind that?

Sponsler: Yeah, thank you. Well, about a year and a half ago, my office at OOCDR, we sponsored Equity Facilitation with the 12 mediation centers with their organizational leaders. We use the Meyer Memorial Trust DEI Spectrum tool to ground those conversations. And one of the pieces that rose out of that was the need to improve outreach and services to non-English community members, particularly the Spanish-speaking community.

This goes back to the beginning of community mediation. It started in the United States back in the sixties during the civil rights movement as efforts to achieve racial, ethnic, class and gender equality gained momentum. And one goal of that act was to reform the justice system, but there was a second parallel path that developed that more closely aligned with the philosophical framework of the activism. There was an understanding that the forum for resolution for community civic issues was within the community itself, not necessarily the institutional structures that are designed to address those conflicts.

So taking that belief, that the forum was with the communities, that resolving these disputes was within the community, we wanted to dig deeper into those conversations with Spanish-speaking communities. And this training was one small step towards that conversation and creating more sustainable services.

Miller: There are ways around basic language gaps. I mean, you can have interpreters and I understand that there are interpreters. When, say, there’s a native English speaker and a native speaker of some other language who has more limited English skills. How does that impact a mediation session? What can that accomplish and what is not solved through interpretation?

Sponsler: As what Veronica was saying, in community mediation, solutions come from listening and connecting and understanding. And yes, while all the centers do provide interpretation services, there’s something [that] gets lost in the translation there and in the interpretation. When parties are reaching out to the centers, they’re looking to move forward, they’re under a lot of stress. So they’re looking to build trust and be able to move forward. One of those ways of connecting is being able to speak to the party in their first language and not only speak, probably more importantly, to be able to listen to the other party in their first language. So you can build trust better and be able to move to a resolution in a more efficient manner.

Miller: Veronica Bañuelos, one of the things we’re talking about here is the difference between the linguistic nuances maybe and things that can get lost in translation. What are examples of those?

Bañuelos: It’s also just the culture itself, like, here’s a big generalization and I hope there’s some truth to this, right? As Latinos, we are more of interdependent people, we’re very relational, versus more of the sort of hyper-independence. So we tend to learn in community. So the way that I teach in English is different than the way that I teach in Spanish, where we tend to do more relational things. “How have you been practicing your tools this week?” And really diving deep into some of those personal stories. So subtle differences like that, where even the language that we use in English is more around self-awareness, self-discovery, self-esteem. We tend to be like, OK, well, relational awareness, relational fulfillment, relational discovery, how am I in my community? So that actually plays out in the way that I teach, in the way that we learn in community. That’s just one other aspect of that.

Then, when I’ve done mediation in Spanish, folks will say, “well, can I bring my relative, can I bring somebody with me?” And that’s actually very common because we are more sort of this connected relational communal folks. So again, it’s not just language, it’s culture, it’s learning. And so it’s knowing how to adapt to that.

Miller: Gabriela, I’m curious, as somebody who took this Spanish language training and as a native Spanish speaker, after you’d already done the training in English, what did you notice? What was different for you?

Buamscha: Thank you for that question. And my answer will add to what my peers were talking about. When we speak in our first language, we’re surrounded by people that share the culture. Like in this case, the Latin American culture, we can re-access our emotions much better. And on top of that, we can learn better in our first language, especially if the one guiding speaks that language as their first language too and again, share the culture. So when all these things come together in mediation, you access emotions.

As a mediator, if you’re speaking your first language, like when I mediate in Spanish, or two parties that speak Spanish and requested that service, I myself, as a mediator, can access my emotions easier, right? I need to learn as a mediator to manage my emotions. Because mediation is the mediation is between the parties, not the mediator. The mediator only facilitates the conversation. And that’s also why this is so empowering because the parties first start talking, maybe they never talk face to face in a safe place, which mediation will give you, a safe place where what we discuss is confidential.

Then we try to solve it - not the mediator, the parties. And I literally relearn the process of mediation because through the 35 hours of this training, I had to access - and it was really hard - all my emotions, all my own things. And for instance, when you mediate, sometimes there’s people fighting over something that you might not think about that is close to you. But in the middle of the mediation, things come up that relate to something that hurt you or bothers you or is important to you, like you are very passionate. And you need to put, as a mediator, that aside, because you might start taking sides for one party or the other. So all that might not happen in another language because your brain is working differently. And Veronica knows more about this.

Miller: Well, Veronica, in that example, I think that the scenario was that the two parties were both native Spanish speakers. I’m curious about when that’s not the case. Say, that one is native Spanish speaker and one is a native English speaker. And the mediator is, say, maybe a newly trained native Spanish speaker. It strikes me as a kind of reversal of the dominant culture norm in terms of government agencies or the legal system. How might that linguistic power balance affect a mediation?

Bañuelos: Well, I think one of the things that I train mediators on is exactly that, to understand when you’re standing in for the system, right? What I mean by system is like, where is the power? So there’s all of these different ways that we can hold power. It really depends on who the person is and why they are there. But for us to be really clear on understanding the different dynamics that are at play and to be able to sort of normalize that and bring those into the table as well. So I’m just saying like, I’m just gonna normalize and name that right now, we’re at the table, and there’s some power differences within the context of this conversation. To be able to name those things, I think is really important and to acknowledge it.

Miller: One thing that comes to mind is just literally this conversation we’re having right now, that we’re having it in English. If I could speak Spanish, we could probably dig deeper in different ways between, certainly Veronica and Gabriela, and I don’t know, Patrick, if you speak Spanish too. I don’t really at all. I mean, it’s pervasive, the issues we’re talking about is not just in mediation, it’s everywhere in life.

Patrick Sponsler, we’re just talking about one training so far. That’s relatively limited. What are your broader plans to expand on what you’ve done? And what are your biggest hopes for where this could go?

Sponsler: Yeah, thank you. We have a goal of implementing sustainable services, but we want this to be a thoughtful build over time. So right now, we are in the process of listening and engaging in meaningful conversations with community partners and the long-term plan is still formulating. When we first started exploring this training, I was actually a little surprised that there aren’t these trainings available across the nation. And so it was a little bit of a surprise that there was a bill that needed to be had.

In the more long-term, we’re looking to invest in one region of the state and have them build out their programming, so that then we can pull back together with the other statewide organizations and share lessons learned with the entire statewide network. And we’re listening to and exploring what we exactly need to build that capacity, so that we can continue developing the work out of our 2025 legislative allocation for next year.

Miller: Patrick Sponsler, Veronica Bañuelos and Gabriela Buamscha, thanks very much.

Bañuelos: Thank you.

Buamscha: Thank you.

Miller: Patrick Sponsler is the administrator of the Oregon Office for Community Dispute Resolution. Veronica Bañuelos led a recent workshop. Gabriella Buamscha participated in it.

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