Tools ‹ William Kaplan — WordPress.

Welcome.  This blog is all about conflict.

My career is based upon other people’s conflicts.  Some people pull teeth for a living while others fix cars.  I listen to people yell and talk a lot.  I also help them sort through stories and try to pull it all together.

One summer, many years ago, I was sitting on a front stoop in Southwest Philly.  So there I was, eating cherry water ice and a pretzel with mustard thinking about my future plans of foreign service (State Department, UN, whatever) after I graduated from college.

As I was dreaming, my eyes opened to what was happening in front of me, down the street at my high school and around the corner on Woodland Avenue.  If they could afford it, many white families moved out of the neighborhood, mainly to get away from the blacks and the Asians (Vietnamese and Cambodians), who were moved into the neighborhood almost as buffers. In high school, I ate my lunch in class during second period.  No lunchroom.  Too crowded, too unmanageable.  And lots of illegal drugs.

And then there was Woodland Avenue.  People became poorer and more concentrated in smaller areas.  Faces changed, more African languages were being spoken.  Stores changed, signs changed.  So-called “random” acts of violence happened, often.

So I returned to the neighborhood after I graduated.  I worked in a small warehouse and I helped a grandmother, Mother London, prepare free meals for adults and lots of children.  One of my first paying gigs was to help a group of young people deal with a brutal murder that happened at a local playground.  On another project, I facilitated a large group of Puerto Rican and Palestinian students who were fighting and not-so-secretly dating each other.

Almost twenty years later, I am designing conflict analysis models and writing about it in a blog.

How did you become a teacher, case manager,or advocate?  Was there a path that lead you there or were you surprised?