About the Divided Community Project & This Publication

The Divided Community Project (DCP) is housed at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law within the College’s preeminently ranked Program on Dispute Resolution. DCP seeks to support community leaders as they identify and address issues tearing at the social fabric of their respective communities. DCP services are informed by conflict resolution, mediation, and dispute systems design theory and practice and grounded in the principle that problem-solving initiatives and resolutions must be informed, shaped, and led by people who will live with the outcomes. DCP brings together community leaders, elected officials, activists, law enforcement, faith leaders, and academics to develop guidance for community leaders in facing conflict in diverse community settings. The shared goal is to strengthen local capacity to transform division into collaboration.

The project offers a variety of resources for communities and their leaders, including the following:

• Direct real-time mediation, facilitation, and conciliation services for those facing a community or campus conflict from The Bridge Initiative@Moritz, and “office hours” for those engaged in planning in this context, upon request and at no cost to the community.
• Multiday academy training programs for community and campus leadership teams.
• Multiparty real-time tabletop community conflict simulations which permit leadership teams to identify how to hone their preparation in advance of divisive situations.
• Checklists and guides with ideas and illustrations for facilitating potentially contentious matters which may tear at the fabric of a community.
• Interdisciplinary research and award-winning academic articles connected to this work.

Winner of the American Bar Association Section on Dispute Resolution’s Cooley Lawyer as a Problem-Solver Award. The JAMS Foundation, AAA-ICDR Foundation, U.S. Department of Justice, the Ohio State University Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Kettering Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation provided significant support for the project.

For more about the project, look here: https://go.osu.edu/dcp.

Recommended citation: Divided Community Project, Leading a Community During Times of Conflict: Effective Strategies to Build Resilience, Plan Ahead, and Respond to Crises (3rd ed., 2025), https://go.osu.edu/dcpleading.

Those seeking to copy or distribute this guide for target audiences may do so for nonprofit purposes. They may also modify the text for nonprofit purposes as long as they give attribution, and they allow the same “share alike” use of their text by others. Note that all images subject to individual copyright restrictions. Please let the Divided Community Project know if you make use of the text. New permissions for use of the photos may be required for a modified document.

Other community-related publications by the Divided Community Project are available on Ohio State’s Knowledge Bank and DCP’s toolkit, https://go.osu.edu/dcptoolkit.

• Symbols and Public Spaces Amid Division: Practical Ideas for Community and University Leaders (3rd ed. 2025).
• Tools for Building Trust: Designing Law Enforcement-Community Dialogue and Reacting to the Use of Deadly Force and other Critical Law Enforcement Actions (2024)
• Identifying a Community Spirit (2019).
• Leading a Divided Campus: Ideas and Illustrations (4th ed. 2025).

Support for this guide was provided by: In 2023 and 2024, this project was supported, in part, by federal award number 15JCOPS-23-GK-03990-PPSE awarded to The Ohio State University by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. The opinions contained herein are those of the author(s) or contributor(s) and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific individuals, agencies, companies, products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the author(s), contributors, or the U.S. Department of Justices. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement the discussion of the issues.

The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, and The JAMS Foundation, in partnership with the National Civic League, provided resources for the development of this guidance. Many individuals (see Acknowledgments) donated their time and expertise.