MML Review Magazine Fall 2026

NEIGHBOR 2 NEIGHBOR

Neighbor 2 Neighbor program cases are managed through Citizens Mediation Service in St. Joseph.

Talking It Out, Neighbor 2 Neighbor

ST. JOSEPH pop. 7,856

By Emily Pinsuwan

When people have an issue, sometimes the best solution is to just talk about it. That’s the idea behind the City of St. Joseph’s Neighbor 2 Neighbor (N2N) program, which, for a $25 fee, works to help residents of Berrien County resolve neighborly disputes—ones not governed by zoning or city codes—before tensions escalate to an already busy court system. The idea is to “put the resolution to the issue in the hands of the people who have the issue,” says Jenny Miner, executive director at Citizens Mediation Service, a six-county nonprofit that administers the N2N program for Berrien County. Mediation is a form of structured dispute resolution, moderated by a trained, impartial third party. It’s often used in workplace disputes and family matters, such as divorce. The N2N practice takes that into everyday neighborhood conflicts. “People may be frustrated about noise or boundaries or fences,” says Miner. “[Mediation can be an] appropriate format to try to resolve that issue without going into, ‘What does the City say? What do attorneys say?’ Instead, it’s about, How. . . do you guys want to resolve this as neighbors?”

Every county in Michigan has a dispute resolution center funded through the Department of Justice. While the N2N program is specific to Berrien County, “I would say that if anybody called any one of them, they would help with a neighbor-to-neighbor dispute,” says Miner. Residents can call N2N directly, or they might be pointed in that direction by law enforcement or municipal officials. “We have little cards that our police carry around that can refer people to us,” says Miner. If an irritated neighbor calls the police over a relatively minor issue like a dog barking or excessive noise next door, “it gives them something to leave with people rather than saying, ‘Look, there’s not a whole lot we can do about the dog,’ which is a tough situation for them to be in.” “The biggest fit for us has been in our rental department,” says Clint Levi, a building inspector for the City of St. Joseph, which has both a property maintenance and a residential rental program. “Especially for our small municipality—I think we’re like four square miles, and we’ve got almost two thousand rentals. So, landlord-tenant disputes come up quite often.”

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