11/29/2004
Mother knew best
Sandi Kahn Shelton , Register Staff

Strange as it sounds, the fact that La’rie McGruder Hunt was a hot-tempered fighter in high school has turned out to be a great thing for the families of New Haven.

It wasn’t that Hunt was looking for trouble, she says now. It was just that she often found herself in the thick of disagreements at the Sound School back in 1991, when she was 15.

"I had moved here from rural Indiana, and I couldn’t believe the way kids here were always disrespecting each other. Fights were always breaking out, and often I was right there in the middle," she says. "It was not a good time for me."

Luckily for the rest of us, though, Hunt’s mother, Patricia Boozer, knew just what to do. She was a student at the Yale Divinity School, doing a field placement at Community Mediation in Fair Haven. She convinced her daughter to learn peer mediation in a program offered at the school.

"I wanted her to learn how to keep fights from happening," says Boozer. "I loved doing mediations, and so I said to her, ‘You need this. This will make a big difference in your life.’"

And it worked.

Hunt stopped fighting and become a mediator. And with one-fourth of the student body also trained in mediation skills, the number of fights went to zero.

But best of all, Hunt discovered she had a real gift for mediation. Her mother calls her a natural peacemaker who has a way of getting to the very heart of a conflict and allowing the participants to understand each other’s point of view. She and her mother and her brother, Duke Porter, started their own organization to help kids in rough neighborhoods learn conflict resolution. Survivin’ n Da Hood has now been going strong for 13 years, giving young people a new way of avoiding violence.

In 2003, after attending Quinnipiac University where she studied sociology, getting married, and having three children (now ages 7, 6 and 2), Hunt was hired at Community Mediation as the family mediation counselor.

She is, as executive director Charlie Pillsbury puts it, a homegrown success story.

Hunt coordinates two programs at Community Mediation: the Child and Family program, in which couples come in to work out custody and visitation problems, and the Teen/Parent program, which gives kids and their parents a chance to understand each other when it’s too hard for them to talk at home.

Hunt, who speaks in a calm, soft voice and has an easy smile, says, "What we really do is help people listen to each other. Sometimes they’re so angry that they can’t hear the other person’s point of view. A mediator’s job is to listen to both sides and not judge, just mirror back what the person is saying, not give advice and not embarrass or judge them.

"To do it, you have to completely focus on what’s really being said, and then repackage the words to take the sting out of them so that the other person can respond."

Hunt estimates she does two to three mediations per week, as well as a stint in the high schools where she works with kids who are having trouble with peers.

"You have to feel your way through, peel back the layers to get to the problem. What’s at the heart of all these conflicts, though, is disrespect: a breakdown in communication caused by people not respecting each other."

Often, she says, it’s a relief to the parties simply to sit and talk to each other for the two-hour mediation period. "In so many families, there’s no time for those kinds of conversations.

"They don’t have time to enjoy each other or to talk. Here, they have an opportunity to say the things they want to say. It’s a safe place. And best of all, we teach them the skills so they can do this on their own."

"Typically, I find myself sitting across the table from a 14-year-old girl who was doing great last year when she was 13, but now is feeling rebellious and pushing her curfew a bit and starting a lot of backtalk to her mom," says Hunt.

"This is where it’s great that I was a strong-willed teenager myself. I can understand both points of view and help each other see what the other’s life is like. Sometimes adults really don’t understand what it’s like to be in high school now. I can help them see each other’s point of view."

Pillsbury says that Hunt brings a great deal of credibility to the program. "She got the job over dozens of applicants, and with no special treatment," he adds. "Kids know she’s been where they are, and they respect her. It’s great that this program has sown what it has reaped."