PENINSULA PROFILE: Head of mediation center helps resolve conflicts through communication

PORT ANGELES — Karen Brown could hardly reach the handlebars. But reach she did. A 5-year-old kid with a new set of wheels — the one bicycle given to all five children in her family — she was determined to go somewhere on it.

So she raised her chin high, stretched out her arms and bicycled around Gibsonburg, Ohio — and later around six other states and some of Europe.

Now Brown is 52 and still riding her bike, among other activities, with that same spirit of go-for-it. If a task looks big and complex, well, just let her at it: starting a leadership camp for girls, taking on the Outrageous Olympics, leading the nonprofit Peninsula Dispute Resolution Center.

After 15 years at Peninsula College — during which she developed the G.I.R.L.S. — Gifted Individuals Realizing Leadership Skills — Camp, Brown found herself out of a job. Amid 2010’s state budget cuts, she was laid off.

Not long after that, a friend told her about the Outrageous Olympics. These odd games, in which “athletes” throw Nerf balls and fly paper airplanes, constitute an annual fundraiser for the United Way of Clallam County.

Brown, though, wasn’t familiar with these events. So she shifted into high gear, learned about the outrageousness and became the coordinator. Last year, she led the Outrageous Olympics to a new record: $10,381 raised, up from $5,700 the previous fall.

2011 was also the year in which Brown started a brand-new job, the likes of which she had never done before.

Early last year, Laura O’Neal left her executive director post at the Peninsula Dispute Resolution Center after seven years.

The past president of Resolution Washington, the state association of dispute resolution centers, O’Neal went on to become a partner in Peninsula Mediation and Training, a company serving four Western states, and became legislative assistant to 24th District state Rep. Steve Tharinger.

And so the PDRC, a mediation center serving both Clallam and Jefferson counties, needed a new chief to direct its slim staff, dozens of volunteers, training programs — and its complex work with families, coworkers, companies and others in conflict.

After her long tenure, O’Neal was and is well-known. So Brown thought, “How can I fill those kind of shoes?”

Then she and O’Neal went on a road trip together, to Olympia where O’Neal was to testify on behalf of Resolution Washington.

On this journey, the two women covered a lot of things. It became clear to Brown that she wanted to take on this job.

“It was scary — and exciting at the same time,” she admitted.

Brown threw herself into studying the center’s services: mediation in Clallam and Jefferson counties’ small claims courts; restorative justice for offenders and victims; mediation for parents and teenagers, neighbors and those going through divorce and child custody struggles.

Then there are the center’s mediation training programs and group facilitation services. Brown learned too about funding from the United Way, from the state and from fees charged to PDRC clients.

She learned that no one is turned away for lack of ability to pay.

Next, Brown went through a series of interviews with the PDRC board of directors and landed her new job in spring 2011.

The learning picked up speed: how to write the budget, build the website and the marketing plan, get good at QuickBooks and present the PDRC’s services to community groups.

“This is an overwhelming job,” Brown says. But “I have an amazing staff,” as well as volunteers who are, in her word, “magic.”

The staff includes Mindy Aisling, coordinator of the W.I.T.T., or We’re in This Together, program for teenagers and their parents. W.I.T.T. meets one weekend a month and aims to help the family members understand one another better.

Brown marvels at Aisling’s skill, just as she hails the other staff and volunteers who are the engine of the PDRC. Among them is Irene Irvine, who says she “went in cold” one day to see about becoming a mediator.

Volunteer mediators must complete a 40-hour training course, pass an examination and finish eight observation sessions and eight co-mediations with a certified mediator. Irvine is on the observation step, having begun volunteering at the center just three months ago.

She phoned Brown in May, and by happenstance, a training was beginning the next weekend.

“She was really, really busy,” Irvine said of Brown. But “she just opened up the door for me; really listened to me.”

When she thinks of Brown, she thinks of “her brightness. She keeps the energy up.”

How she does this dates back to Ohio and that too-big bicycle.

Brown harnesses the energy she generates herself, on her road and mountain bikes.

She pedals to and from Sequim as many times a week as she can; it takes as much time as “a movie and a couple of sit-coms,” or about three hours. And then there are the dirt trails: Her fiance, Shawn Sinskie, introduced her to mountain biking, which she now loves.

Oh, and on any given evening, she’ll row 5,000 meters in about 27 minutes, on the machine out in her garage where she has a view of the Olympic Mountains.

At the office, Brown likes to do the vacuuming. It’s a restorative time, she says, amid brain-intensive days. Perhaps the most unusual fitness routine in her repertoire, though, is standing all day while answering the phone and working at her computer.

Yet she is not the all-around queen of exercise. Sinskie is a CrossFit instructor, and she has not dived into that regimen.

“I want to do it. But something is keeping me back,” she says. “I want to overcome the road block.”

That’s a personal goal. Professionally, Brown hopes for something similar: the removal of communication blockages.

The PDRC’s services “can help people understand how to communicate differently,” she says.

Volunteer mediators start by helping clients explain their perspectives. Then they can break down the problem into manageable pieces by making a list of items to be discussed. Next comes negotiation, often with creative approaches, and finally a written settlement.

Not everyone reaches that settlement, Brown acknowledges. She and the volunteers hope, however, that clients come away with new communication skills.

For the PDRC, the most common mediation cases are those involving custody of children and parenting plans between divorced parents.

Mortgage foreclosures are also keeping mediators busy. In some cases, a modified plan is made, and the foreclosure averted. There are also all kinds of workplace disputes, conflicts between neighbors, landlords and tenants.

“I’ve always been fascinated by people and groups,” says Brown, “and how we interact. I’ve always observed — trying to understand — the culture of a neighborhood, of a community.”

Brown moved to Port Angeles in 1991 after living in England with her former husband, who served in the U.S. Air Force.

She also has lived all over the United States, working in the hospitality industry for companies big and small, including Princess Cruises.

Brown’s formal education includes a degree in leadership and cultural studies from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, which she earned while working full time.

When she first heard about Port Angeles, she had her doubts about living here — but has come to love it.

“Everything is so close,” she says, including the big playground that is the Olympic Mountains and coast.

At work, “every day is different,” Brown says, adding that she would love to expand the PDRC’s work with young people. Her message on behalf of her organization is that conflict will always be with us and that we need not shrink away from it.

“Conflict is good,” she says. “It helps us learn to communicate in new ways.”