DRC Capacity-Building Progress Report

A special progress report on our three-year Capacity-Building Initiative

Dear DRC volunteers, supporters and community partners,

I wanted to give you a personal update on our Capacity-Building Initiative, as we recently passed the mid-point of this three-year effort.

Arising out of the needs and challenges we faced in 2020, the DRC launched an ambitious process of re-envisioning, restructuring and expanding our operations and service provision for long-term sustainability.

The vision for our Capacity-Building Initiative focuses on strategic investments in Technology, Facilities and People, with the goals of enhancing Service, Access and Equity. How we fulfill our mission and provide equitable access to our services determines our relevance and importance to our community.

Our Progress

We have made important strides over the past 18 months, notably the growth of our facilities as we were able to expand into additional office space in our current building in West Olympia. If you were able to attend our Open House last spring, you saw the additional training, mediation, conference and staff space this expansion has made possible. If you have not seen our new facilities, I invite you to contact us to arrange a tour. We look forward to resuming in-person services in this expanded space in the near future.

Investments in our staffing have also begun, most notably in new services focused on eviction resolution and housing stability, and in increasing the number of bilingual staff and volunteers.

This is a time of exciting and encouraging "New Beginnings" for the DRC. I invite you to learn more about our progress, services and impact in our 2022 Community Impact Report.

The generous support of many individual contributors, local businesses, foundations, and state and local governments has made these positive initial strides possible. However, much of our current government support is short-term, temporary funding. At this point in time we have secured less than 50% of the support needed to achieve our capacity-building goals and achieve long-term sustainability, and there is much more work to be done.

Needs & Next Steps

We envisioned at the start of this initiative that the increased use of technology and remote/virtual services would continue into the future. This ability to provide services in the online environment has many benefits and, not surprisingly, requires more ongoing technology costs to run smoothly:

We currently use six Zoom licenses to support our operations and sometimes, even that is not enough;
We must use a confidential online document signing service in order to handle both agreements to mediate and final agreements, which requires an annual subscription;
Communication with clients is of course, critical; we are finding more and more do not respond to email and need reminders and other information shared via text, which requires another cloud-based service subscription;
Recent upgrades in our phone system, network, security firewall, software and hardware have quickly shown us that we need onsite, real-time IT support more than we ever could have been imagined before; and,
Our systems must operate with high capacity for running multiple programs at once, including high-bandwidth video calls and more – this means we are needing a higher capacity of computers than in years prior (more memory, more RAM and faster processors).

We also recognize that in order to more fully represent our community in our mediator pool, and live into our vision of a South Sound Community that has and uses healthy and respectful conflict resolution skills, we need to make our training opportunities more accessible. Our initial steps in that direction include allocating a portion of spaces in our trainings to be made available to those with limited financial resources through expanded Training Scholarships. We will be sharing more information about this effort - and how you can help support it - in the coming weeks.

Conflict resolution is essential to community healing and cohesion

Empowering our neighbors to repair relationships, resolve disagreements, and communicate with respect and civility remains as essential today as it was when community mediation centers were getting their early start as neighborhood justice centers in the 1960’s. With your continuing support, we will be prepared to meet this ongoing, vital need.

Thank you!

Jody M. Suhrbier

Executive Director

Click here to learn more about our Capacity-Building Initiative and how you can help support it.