Community-based mediation centers, including the Fairfield Center in Harrisonburg, face a difficult financial reality as payments for court-ordered referrals have stagnated. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
The Fairfield Center's two dozen mediators deal in resolution – sitting down with families, parents, tenants and landlords, and church and community groups who are at odds with one another and trying to find a mutually acceptable path forward.
NOEL LEVAN: This is a collaborative process. … Every voice is heard, and you've got somebody neutral who can reality test whether something is actually doable, and somebody is going to commit with their signature to doing what they say they might.
Noel Levan is a family mediator and parenting educator at the center, as well as president of its board of directors. The organization usually takes in between 400-500 cases a year, many of which are referred to the center by judges. They have contracts with the court systems of Shenandoah, Page, Harrisonburg-Rockingham, Staunton, Augusta, Waynesboro, and Rockbridge.
CHRISTINE POULSON: The reason that so many judges like mediation is because the clients know their story.
Christine Poulson is the executive director of Resolution Virginia, a network of the state's seven community mediation centers.
POULSON: They know their lives. They know their children, and so they're in the best position to make the best decisions for their families. A judge only has a limited amount of time to look at your paperwork, look at you, and make a decision about your life.
The vast majority of the Fairfield Center's cases are family cases. This can involve custody agreements or child and spousal support, but Levan says parenting plans are the most common issue. This is a legal document that lays out all the logistics of co-parenting a child, such as transportation, what time they drop off and pick up the child, who gets their medication, what's happening around birthdays and holidays …
LEVAN: It addresses how they're going to deal with any kind of an emergency, who is going to be available for both parents in terms of childcare. … Are there people in either parent's families who we do not want this child to be around because of whatever those issues might be? … We have to address things that people don't want to necessarily talk about, but children's safety is paramount.
Some clients choose mediation on their own initiative, without a judge's referral.
Lori Mier is a former client who used the Fairfield Center's services for her divorce. Her ex consented to WMRA sharing about this legally confidential process. Mier said mediation was cheaper than going through attorneys, and gave them a chance to talk things out.
LORI MIER: They explained it really well, I think, in the phone interviews, and so we kind of knew what to expect when we got there, and how it would run.
After separate phone interviews, they sat down for one in-person session that took about two or three hours.
MIER: It was obviously emotional, but I think that they prepped us well so that it didn't get too emotional. I definitely think it was better than the alternative, in seeking out lawyers and things like that. They were effective in helping us figure out one thing that we weren't agreeing on and moving us along. But the overall process was great.
Still others come to the Fairfield Center via police referral – which started in 2018 as a collaboration between the center and the Staunton Police Department. It's grown into a three-year statewide project supported by federal funding.
TOM DOMONOSKE: Any problem where the parties are working in good faith to try and solve it is a candidate for mediation.
Tom Domonoske is a Harrisonburg-based consumer protection lawyer and former board president at the Fairfield Center. He previously worked as a legal aid lawyer in Farmville, where he occasionally represented parents in custody cases.
DOMONOSKE: Basically, the legal system creates two teams … in order to find out which team can find out the most truth about the past. … So it's a competition. … It's what I've been trained to do. It's my profession. And it is absolutely the worst way to figure out what's better for a child in the future. … If the problem can be resolved through mediation, that is a far better process.
The Fairfield Center offers a sliding scale for private mediations. The state court system pays for mediation services referred by a judge, but only $120 for most appointments. That rate was set about 10 years ago, and even that was only a $20 raise from the year 2000, when it was codified at $100 per mediation appointment. If that amount had kept up with inflation, it would have nearly doubled by now.
POULSON: The amount that's paid doesn't meet either the personnel costs or the overhead costs of the center, and that's true for the other centers in Virginia as well.
LEVAN: It's the rent. It's the phones. It's the computer services. It's the database, outcome tracker. It's the hourly wage we would love to be able to pay people for what they're really worth. … In all honesty, what we get from the court contract only pays about half of the actual costs of doing the mediation.
Poulson says several mediation centers have closed over the years due to inadequate funding – in Norfolk, Fredericksburg, two in Woodstock, and two in Richmond. Meanwhile, the numbers of court-referred mediations across the state are gradually climbing back towards pre-pandemic levels. Last fiscal year, the Virginia Department of Judicial Services reported nearly 8,800 mediations between Juvenile and Domestic Relations Courts and General District Courts. That's still about a third fewer cases than in fiscal year 2019.
But locally, Levan says their court-referred caseload has been steady.
LEVAN: I think it's solely because we have judges who have been advocating for mediation, and they are influencing other judges.
Regardless of how clients find their way to the center, the process can be transformational. Levan recounts one group of sisters, fighting over what to do with their late parents' property, who –
LEVAN: … came in hating each other, and left just hugging each other [chuckles] because the misunderstandings among them were clarified. … It can be life-altering.
The Fairfield Center is one of more than 150 local nonprofits fundraising through the Great Community Give on Wednesday.
