During the 1970's, private organizations and Federal agencies established dispute resolution projects to assist overloaded courts. Most were associated with a court or agency, but recently community-based programs have merged which are able to extend their roles in helping people solve their own problems beyond criminal justice matters. It is debatable whether dispute resolution systems are a vehicle for social change or merely another social service. The key to this question is the ability of a program to look beyond the immediate individual problems presented in a conflict to broad, community-wide issues. Disputes handled by mediation centers appear to be petty problems involving failures in communication, but in reality have more to do with disparities in power and possessions. The literature on concilation and mediation indicates that informal settlement processes are used consciously or unconsciously as tools of power. Researchers have observed that mediators have no enforcement powers and tend to side with authority because they cannot impose an unfavorable decision on the more powerful party. A description of a landlord-tenant dispute illustrates a type of resolution program which reflects the unequal bargaining powers of the parties. However, some community organizers are adopting a collective approach to community problems and moving away from the legal model of dispute resolution programs. An example of this method traces how complaints against an owner for failing to board up a gutted house that had become a haven for gangs evolved into a community hearing focusing on problems of vandalism, narcotics, and juvenile delinquency. This ability to generalize from apparently individual problems provides community-based dispute resolution projects with the potential for enabling social change. The article includes 12 footnotes.