News

Latest Podcast launched

We are delighted to announce the launch of our latest podcast. 

In this episode, Robert from the Scottish Community Mediation Centre talks with Ann. Ann is one of Sacro’s mediators who works for Fife’s Community Safety Support Service. She talks about her experience of being a mediator and her work in mediating with Additional Support Needs cases. 

“Some clients start out timid and afraid to share their point of view…. but once as they see us as mediators don’t take sides…they can gain their voice and opinions and you can feel their confidence building and they can see light at the end of the tunnel”

Spotlight on our service

The City of Edinburgh Household Support Service

The Household Support service within City of Edinburgh Council brings together a range of services formerly organised through housing support and community safety provision. The team is busy with referrals from Housing, social care services and others as well as providing direct access to those in need. 

The service provides holistic and practical support to the city’s diverse and growing communities, helping residents with support to sustain their home and to address issues of antisocial behaviour and neighbour disputes. There are also projects working with families on parenting skills and school attendance.

Selling Mediation

Leading up to our Selling Mediation workshop later this year, we thought it would be helpful to explore this subject a little.

Selling mediation seems at first sight to be something that many of us will naturally shy away from. Mediators, after all, are not part of a salesforce or work in a consumer based sector. They are not motivated by sales targets or financial results. So why would we use the phrase selling? It is because here in the UK community mediation does need to be sold. Many people who are in conflict have never heard of mediation - they may confuse it with meditation or even medication! For others they may have either a limited understanding or the entirely false understanding of what mediation is. But there is more to the word selling. For ‘selling’ implies a commitment, positivity and an eagerness from the mediator to help people engage and “buy in” to the process.

A good summary

In this blog I will talk about summarising. For those who know anything about mediation, you will know that the mediator is not there to make suggestions or force people to an agreement. What they are there for however is to help all parties involved move forward and find a way to negotiate and reach an agreement. One of the skills that can help is summarising.

So what good is there in a summary? A good summary can achieve several things:

· it is an opportunity to check your own understanding of what has been said

· it provides all parties in the meeting to hear again - in shorthand - what has been said by all parties. Remember that this meeting is probably the first time a party will have heard, calmly and from a place of safety, a different perspective

· it demonstrates to both clients that they have been listened to

· it holds up a mirror to them, allowing time to reflect on what they have said, on how they’re feeling. It allows them to perhaps change their perspective slightly, to say “That’s not what I said, that’s not what I meant” even if you have accurately summarised what they said.