LCCR History
On June 17, 1993, Loyola Law School received notice that our proposed program was approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for funding in the amount of $43,000. The program was first named the Conflict Resolution Center (CRC), but because it had the same initials as the Computer Resource Center (CRC) at Loyola, its name was changed to The Center For Conflict Resolution (The Center). Later at one of our first community meetings we discovered that there was another community program funded by Los Angeles County with the same name. It was then Called The Loyola Law School Center For Conflict Resolution. In addition to the County grant, The Center received $20,000 in additional funding from the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, Burke, Williams & Sorenson, Hughes Aircraft, the Public Interest Law Foudnation, and Musick, Peeler & Garrett.
Marta S. Gallegos, The Center's first Associate Director, was hired in September 1993, and Professor Bill Hobbs was hired in January 1994 as The Center's first Director. The purpose of the Center was to provide bilingual mediation, conciliation and facilitation services to low-income monolingual Latino community residents in Los Angeles County with a particular focus on residents in the area immediately surrounding the law school - the Pico-Union sector of the First Supervisorial District of Los Angeles. The goal is to provide conflict resoution assistance to people who cannot afford traditional legal representation and to provide training to those who work in social and legal service agencies whose programs benefit low0income Latino community residents.
In its first year, The Center commenced a multi-faceted outreach program designed to provide the community with knowledge about The Center and its services. In January 1994, our first four students were trained (only one spoke Spanish) to provide mediation, conciliation and facilitation services, under attorney supervision, for class credit. Later, The Center trained and employed two work-study students who assisted in providing The Center's services year round. By the end of the first year The Center had trained 12 students. Now we have more than 50 students working with us each year.
The Center also provided training to the community to enable them to resolve their own conflicts. In its first year, The Center trained 390 people in 24 sessions, 10 of which were interpreted entirely in Spanish. Today we continue to train the community as requested and also provide two forty-two hour nuts and bolts mediation trainings each year.
By the year 2000, The Center funding had increased to $397,552. The hiring of 8 new staff helped The Center to surpass all program goals reaching over 5,000 individuals through our trainings and our conflict resolution services. The Center provided these services with the assistance of its new staff and 70 Loyola Law School students who assisted in 6,429 cases serving 11,724 individuals (8,655 English speakers and 3,069 in Spanish). By the year 2000, 929 resolutions were reported resolved at The Center. Today we have 300 to 500 cases pending at any one time and resolve approximately 300 disputes each year, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars for the court system.
In 1996, to keep up with student demand, The Center expanded and remodeled its offices to include a mediation room with a two-way viewing mirror for training mediators. In 2011, The Center expanded again, moving off campus to its new location at 800 S. Figueroa. As a result of the move, The Center has expanded its office space for staff and students, and has four mediation rooms (one with the two-way mirror), an intake room, and a classroom for trainings.
In 2002, our founding director, Professor Bill Hobbs, passed away. Professor Mary B. Culbert, who had formerly been the Director of The Disability Mediation Center (also housed at Loyola Law School), and who had been hired by Professor Hobbs to run one of our projects, took over as Director. Professor Culbert is the longest sitting member (currently advisory) of the State Bar ADR Committee - a think tank for the State Bar. She also hosts a myriad of events and conferences each year at the law school. In 2008, Professor Culbert and The Center were recognized in the "Top Neutrals" Supplement to the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journals and to the Sacramento Recorder, in the section on "Community Mediators: taking it to the streets."
The program continues to thrive as it is the second highest DRPA funded program in Los Angeles County today, second only to the Court's ADR Program, and receiving almost $500,000 each year. Since our inception, we have expanded our mediation program to include court-referred and government agency-referred cases. We have developed a relationship with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) for the regular referral of employment mediation cases. Students are allowed to co-mediate these cases with a professional mediator. We have recently embarked on other endeavors, and have started our Restorative Resolutions Project, which is a victim-juvenile defender mediation program. We have partnered with the Probation Department, and are receiving referrals from them. For more information on this project, click here. We are also starting our new Consumer Debt Options Counseling Project this January. The goal of this project is to ensure that people with consumer debt issues receive legal information about their available options, and can thereby more adequately address the best way to manage their debt. For more information on this project, click here. We are currently working on a Collaborative Family Law clinical project with LACFLA. In this clinical program, slated to start Fall 2013, students will be trained and mentored by collaborative law attorneys. For more information on this project, click here.