New Haven Independent

Community Mediation was founded 25 years ago in Fair Haven, with Carol Anastasio (left) as executive director. It grew out of a small group’s interest in exploring alternatives to incarceration. Four years later, Tina Burgett (right) took over, and in 1990, Pillsbury (center) took the reins. The agency started in a room at Farnam Neighborhood House, then moved to a big, old, and rundown house at the other end of Grand Avenue.

Board president Martha Murray (pictured, with the Community Mediation slogan behind her) thanked the dozens of staff, supporters and volunteers for coming. After the ribbon-cutting, people checked out the new digs and chowed down on cake.

La’Rie Magruder (pictured on the right, with fellow staffers Kathy Benoit and Dudley Flake) was only 14 when she learned mediation skills with Survivin’ N Da Hood, a program her mother founded during a violent period in the city in the early 1990s. Now she’s 30 and the director of training for Community Mediation. She says the recent wave of violence, including the murder of 13-year-old Jajuana Cole last week, has her feeling as she did back then.

“What’s going on in the neighborhoods? Where are our community activists? Where are our old school adults who weren’t afraid to talk to people? Let’s get back out there, because these kids really do want to have somebody to be in their ear, telling them, ‘Don’t do that.’”

She says cutbacks in youth programming has created a vacuum where violence often rushes in.

But Magruder’s optimistic, too. She’s about to kick off a new training for adult volunteers, and a new collaboration with Survivin’ N Da Hood to conduct youth mediation trainings this summer.

Charlie Pillsbury has definite opinions about the causes for the upsurge in youth violence. He says the wars in which the United States has been engaged for almost five years are teaching kids that violence is the answer. With more guns on the street, kids now have the ability to live out their violent fantasies, he says. Funding cuts have hurt too. “We see that trickle-down effect. It’s happening at the federal level, then it goes to the state level and now at the city level. We just lost one of our contracts where we were working with the police department trying to mediate conflicts with juveniles, because the city has no money.”

Dozens of people came to celebrate the opening of the new office at 32 Elm Street, including Chamber of Commerce president Tony Resigno and State Sen. Martin Looney (pictured with Pillsbury).

The new office has three floors, including a large meeting space on the top floor for community events as well as staff and board meetings.