Threads of Hope

With our busy lives, our homes, and our families, many of us believe we don’t have the time or energy to volunteer for a good cause. But guess what? The five recipients of Diablo’s 2007 Threads of Hope Awards set a stunning example of how it’s done, as they make major accomplishments in the name of community service.

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Carl Hopkins
Center for Human Development

Ancient cultures had wise men, not lawyers, to help people settle their disputes. The East Bay has Carl Hopkins.

Hopkins, 74, is a volunteer mediator for the Pleasant Hill–based Center for Human Development’s Conflict Resolution Programs. He brings together warring factions and family members to work out disagreements that can be merely irritating or truly heart wrenching.

One week, he listened to a family complain about loud music being played by a neighbor’s teenage son. Another time, he guided adult siblings into deciding how one sister should handle their 90-year-old mother’s finances. And in another session, he helped a drug-addicted young woman realize that she’s not ready for her parents to relinquish guardianship of her two young children.

“One of the important things is that the resolution comes from them; they’re more likely to adhere to it when it’s not imposed on them by somebody else,” says the soft-spoken Hopkins, a retired juvenile probation officer.

In our litigious society, mediation offers an alternative to expensive, time-consuming, and adversarial court battles by showing people that they don’t need judges or other authorities to tell them how to get along.

For Hopkins, being a mediator gives him a chance to act on a long-standing belief in forms of justice that promote reconciliation and healing. He grew up in a loving family with four children in Houston in the 1930s and 1940s, but encountered daily slights as a young black man in the segregated South. During a stint in the army in the 1950s, he fine-tuned his compassion for people under stress by screening out soldiers facing disciplinary action who were actually mentally ill. When his race barred him from job opportunities in Texas, he came to the Bay Area and worked for Contra Costa’s Probation Department. He married and had two children.

Hopkins retired in 1992 and started mediating. Since then, he has emerged as one of the center’s most active volunteers, handling three or four mediations a month. “He listens with his heart, and his words come from his deep understanding of the nature of people in conflict,” says program director Barbara Proctor.

People end up in mediation voluntarily or by court order. The sessions usually last around three hours. Since people’s emotions often run high, Hopkins’s first job is to put people at ease. “We congratulate them for coming. We remind them that this isn’t a court hearing. We’re not judges. We’re not going to determine who’s right or wrong or guilty or innocent.”

Hopkins listens as each side airs its grievances. People often are defensive and as “upset with themselves as the situations they are in,” he says. He then asks questions that encourage participants to stop demonizing the other side. Most of the time, this process of listening and reflection leads people to important breakthroughs. People often lose their anger after they have voiced their complaints and feel that they have been listened to.

“Most of the ill feelings are worked out by the process, and people can talk in a manner that is productive,” he says. “It’s quite rewarding to be involved in this kind of thing.”