Overview:

CommUnity Crisis Services is seeking proposals from qualified training providers to deliver mediation skills training to its Mobile Crisis Response team.

Mobile crisis responders are frequently called to situations that extend beyond individual behavioral health crises into the realm of interpersonal conflict. In these moments, additional mediation skills would be invaluable. Mediation training equips responders with a distinct and complementary skill set: the ability to create conditions for dialogue, support each party’s sense of being heard, and facilitate movement toward mutual understanding and self-determined resolution. These skills are a natural extension of crisis response.

This training is intended to equip Mobile Crisis Responders with practical mediation skills to support conflict coaching, relationship repair, and resolution of interpersonal conflict encountered during crisis calls. The training should be relevant to community settings (i.e., homes, parks, community spaces) often encountered by mobile crisis responders (i.e., family and neighbor disputes) rather than court-involved mediation settings. Trainers should practice transformative or facilitative mediation, not evaluative. 

Important Context:

This RFP is specifically for foundational mediation skills training. A separate partner, Dignity Best Practices, will provide additional training focused on field mediation implementation in a crisis response environment. Proposals should not duplicate that scope, but should prepare responders with strong core mediation competencies that can be applied in the field.

Dignity Best Practices is providing technical assistance to Iowa City/Johnson County to lead the implementation of field mediation. As a trusted partner, Dignity Best Practices would like to be involved in the curriculum design of the training. Related, Dignity Best Practices is leading a local Working Group, which may also provide input on the curriculum.

Dignity Best Practices requests regular communications and virtual meetings with the training provider to communicate feedback on curriculum design and training implementation. 

For more information on the training expectations, see Dignity Best Practices’ Field Mediation Toolkit (Chapter 12).