If you're a 12-year-old kid living in a rowhouse neighborhood, the football game is usually in the street, or in the alley. A parked car might get hit. A few air-conditioning units might catch a stray ball and get dented. There's cussing, trash, and, sometimes, a stench of urine. And if not today, then maybe tomorrow, one of the neighbors is likely to call the police to come quiet everyone down.

The same scene has played out in many of the small neighborhoods that ring Patterson Park: Kids play football in the street, grown-ups get annoyed or intimidated, and conflict results. Four years ago, the conflict on North Streeper Street came to a head. The solution was, ironically, more football-just not in the street.

Now, when the season starts with late August practices, the neighborhood kids who make up the Patterson Park Community Football League get to play in the "bowl"-an expansive green field surrounded by the park's higher slopes. They get real uniforms and gear. They don't have to pay, but if they want to be in the league, they have to promise not to play football in the street.

Before long, the satisfaction for the grown-ups was not so much the peace and quiet, but the positive force the league has played in the life of the middle school-age boys and girls in their neighborhood, says Mike Ferreira, an East Baltimore Street resident known as "Coach Mike" to the Butchers Hill Black Knights.

"They're tough kids. And I have this one-who's now an older kid-and he comes up to me when he sees me in the park and gives me a hug," Ferreira says.

Ferreira says that he has, through the league, gotten to know individual kids, who tell other visiting kids "That's Coach Mike. He's OK."

"Now, if I just walk outside, the kids will say, ‘Oh, we know it's a little loud,' and everybody will quiet down. I now know them, and I'm not just some adult yelling at them and calling police."

How did this turnaround happen?

Help came from a unique method of conflict resolution with roots in the Maori traditions of New Zealand's aborigine people. It is commonly known as community conferencing, and it is practiced widely in Australia as a way of diverting cases that might otherwise end up in court. In Maryland, where it is gaining acceptance, it has been pioneered by the nonprofit Community Conferencing Center, which offers a framework for working out conflict between individuals or groups.

In the thick of the North Streeper Street struggle, Banner Neighborhood Community Corporation, an organization that supports the communities surrounding the park, suggested to residents that they contact Lauren Abramson, founder and executive director of the Community Conferencing Center. The neighbors couldn't even come to a consensus to try it. But after a year, they were ready to talk, community-conferencing style: sitting in a circle, with the ground rule that everybody gets to talk, but by the end, the talk needs to focus on what everybody is willing to do.

The center offers an alternative to going to court, as long as all parties agree to try it. A lot of cases start out with an arrest of a juvenile, for example. But police can refer the case to the Community Conferencing Center. If the problem is resolved, the juvenile might make some kind of restitution, but avoid charges.

Parties meet on neutral ground. A trained facilitator will guide a conversation where the neighbors, or victim and offender in some cases, do most of the talking. But it isn't just a vent session-the whole point is to finish the meeting with a contract that everyone can support, and that will satisfy concerns. It sounds idealistic. But it's been working since 1995.

"Over 5,000 people in Baltimore have been involved in successfully resolving their own crisis or conflict," says Abramson. "Ninety-eight percent of the conferences we have done result in agreement."

Abramson was developing early childhood mental health services in Baltimore Head Start centers when she first heard about the community-conferencing style of conflict resolution from colleagues in Australia.

"I really saw this as a social technology that helps people become emotionally healthier in a collective way," Abramson said. The courts aren't set up for people to talk to each other. Neither the victim nor the offender can fully express his or her feelings. In a legal system based on the Norman principles of retribution and punishment, the law is not always healing. Sometimes, as in medicine, she says, "Using less intervention, you get a better result. You give them a chance to decide what to do."

Abramson started offering community conferencing in 1995. In 1998, she received grants from the Open Society Institute, the Goldseker Foundation, and the state. Abramson started getting referrals from the police, schools, criminal justice system, community organizations, and residents. Now the center has six full-time employees, ten volunteers, and several volunteer facilitators.

If there were a file folder titled "Kids Playing in the Street," it would be the thickest one at the Community Conferencing Center. A lot of tension revolves around these unsupervised ball games. But challenges, like the ones that emerged near Patterson Park, can become a uniting force when communities use the community-conferencing setting.

The most recent of these ball game conflicts was on North Collington Street, a few blocks from Patterson Park. Games went on outside the door of a woman known to the kids as Miss Susie, from early afternoon until long past what she considered a decent bedtime. Kids from the neighborhood and kids she didn't know used language she didn't want to hear. Now and then she would open her door and threaten to call police.

"I cannot get no peace where I live," Miss Susie told the fellow homeowners and kids who had gathered in a circle on a sweltering Saturday in August to finally hash it all out.

A dozen or so adults from the block and three middle-school-age boys had gathered at the neighborhood school for a chance to let each person say what he or she thought, wanted, and was willing to do to find a solution.

The conference began with a tense exchange between Miss Susie, who had lived in the neighborhood for decades, and Miss Liza, an aunt and grandmother of two of the three boys in attendance. Miss Liza was there to defend why they play in the street and alley.

The kids didn't say much at first, a little wary facing all these stern-faced adults. But when they spoke, the adults listened.

One boy said something about when "Miss Susie called the police."

Miss Susie responded with something that seemed to surprise the boy. She said, "I have threatened to call the police. I have never actually called them."

Another boy admitted about his older brother (who was not present), "Yeah, he has an attitude problem."

And while the race issue comes up, homeowners both white and black soon agree that racism isn't the problem at hand. The disagreements are as likely to be between people of the same race (Miss Susie and Miss Liza both happen to be African American).

After lots of honest talk over two hours, there was success and a result: a compact signed by everyone who attended. Among some of the terms: The kids can play in the street and alley, but they have to police each other and their visiting friends. Residents will provide trash bags so the kids can cart away the snack wrappers and drink bottles that sometimes get left on stoops. Kids will help patrol the alley to keep backyard gates closed. And neighbors will pitch in to buy a cover to protect Miss Susie's air conditioning unit from stray balls.

Football, with its language borrowed from war, seems an unlikely icon of reconciliation and peaceful co-existence. But football happened to be the common ground the sparring neighbors on North Streeper Street found to bring them together. It may involve offense and defense, but it's also about teamwork.

Back in 2001, North Streeper Street neighbors such as Don Ferges didn't hate football. They just wanted the kids to take the game to Patterson Park. The kids persisted in playing on the street in front of their homes, and their parents didn't want them near the danger of drugs and exposure to prostitution in the park. The problem escalated and tensions were high. Ferges and others were angry and fed up. There was yelling, confrontation, and more than one hundred calls to the police over the course of a year. That was in October 2001, when a meeting of the neighbors started out with the same explosive emotion that had been surfacing on the streets. And then everything started to change.

One woman suggested that instead of calling police, the adults should respectfully look the kids in their eyes and ask them to be quiet, or to move off their front stoops. The kids at the conference started talking. Turns out they were afraid of playing ball in the park because of the older kids who bully them.

So Ferges, his anger visibly subsiding, volunteered to take kids to the park to chaperone them once a week.

By January 2002, more than one hundred kids were signing up to play in a newly formed Baltimore-Linwood Football League, donations from Banner Neighborhood Community Corporation and the Baltimore Community Foundation paid for uniforms and equipment, and Ferges, a former high school football star, was now "Coach Don." As more neighborhoods from around the park joined the league, it was renamed the Patterson Park Community Football League.

Although the league continues, Ferreira is calling this a "make or break" year for the league. Some of the initial momentum has waned because of the struggle to recruit enough volunteer coaches and enough support to run the program, Ferreira says.

"None of the coaches in the league have kids on the teams, and most of them don't have kids [at all]," says Ferreira, a 35-year-old fire protection engineer. "They're doing this for alternate reasons."

Neighborhood disputes like the ones in Patterson Park are just one example of where this technique can be employed. In another conference suggested by a school suspension officer, a boy was given a twenty-five-day suspension for grabbing his friend's hand and putting it onto a girl's breast in the cafeteria line at a middle school.

The suspension officer, who has a daughter of her own, thought the case might be a good one for community conferencing, because if someone did that to her own child, she'd want to be able to talk to the boy. Turns out the girl's father did want to address the offender, as long as it wouldn't let the boy off easy, Abramson said.

The father wanted to press charges. But, by the end of the conference, the boy was repentant, and the father was asking that the twenty-five-day suspension be shortened.

He extracted a promise from the boy to protect the girls in the school from others who might sexually harass them. The father has since trained as a volunteer facilitator.

What would it take to get community conferencing offered as a first-line treatment for many of society's ills?

It's a fraction of the cost of going to court, and still insists on accountability for the offender, but in a way that also provides healing for the victim-something the courts aren't set up for.

The most important part of a community conference is that it ends with an agreement about what is to be done, and by whom. It isn't just a "town hall meeting" where no resolution happens.

Abramson has made inroads so that the school suspension officers know about the center. Police, state's attorney's offices, and the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services do, too. The Community Conferencing Center has trained facilitators to work in Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Montgomery, and Frederick counties, as well as Washington state, Michigan, England, and the Netherlands.

But Abramson doesn't want it shoved down anyone's throat and perhaps corrupted by a push to have it codified before its usefulness is understood. She wants to see it grow naturally, as it has been doing in city neighborhoods.

"I think it's going to take time," she says. "The agencies that use us typically don't want to fund us. It would be detrimental to have legislation before people are behind what this is about."