Home Sweet Home? A Debate about Homelessness

Description

It’s a snowy day in Toronto and a group of friends meet at a restaurant to celebrate the holidays. As they are eating, someone comments on how cold the weather has been lately. This reminds one of the friends about a recent trending news article (fictional) about a single mother and her four year old child who were living on the streets in the cold weather. As the group hears this, they begin discussing the article and express different assumptions about the situation. The friends express their reasons for why homelessness continues to persist in the city, using different conflict styles from aggressively competing to get their point across, some avoiding conflict and staying quiet, and one who tries to accommodate by encouraging others to listen to each other (Holt & DeVore, 2005). As a result, the conversation gets to an awkward point where everyone sits in silence not knowing what to say. The friend who has more of a collaborative style of mediating restarts the conversation, and encourages everyone to have more respectful dialogue (Mayer, 2012). The friends were able to voice their opinions, and feel heard (Isaacs, 1999). They see competing issues around homelessness as just touching the surface, and begin to agree that the homelessness debate is about meeting basic human needs (Barsky, 2017; Fisher et al., 1991). As they continue through the evening the conflict deescalates, and the friends suspend their judgements. They become more mindful of how they speak to each other, and realize they can respectfully agree and disagree at the same time.