Charlie Pillsbury, one of New Haven's best-known peace activists, has been at the helm of the nonprofit Community Mediation for 20 years.

Under his leadership, the agency's mission grew from resolving neighborhood disputes to taking on larger disputes, like the long-standing animosity and debate over Tweed New Haven Airport, which is run by New Haven, but borders East Haven.

Days before his departure, Pillsbury spoke with the Advocate.

Advocate: What was the biggest dispute you've settled?

Pillsbury: That's certainly the airport, working with the mayors of East Haven and New Haven. In the end, after meeting with me and several of the mediators for five sessions, [East Haven Mayor April Capone Almon and New Haven Mayor John DeStefano] ended up deciding to negotiate one on one and in the end they got themselves on the same page. We helped them build a relationship and trust each other, which they used to come to an agreement.

I like to quote Woody Allen, who says that 80 percent of life is showing up. In mediation, 98 percent of life is just showing up. If people make that agreement to meet with each other face to face, there's already some goodwill, and despite their differences, they can use that to meet on common ground.

The hardest thing we have to do is persuade people to sit down and talk face to face.

A: Do you think President Obama and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should talk face to face?

Pillsbury: The U.S. government should be talking to the Iranian government. I frankly don't see the Iranian president, if I were being asked, as being comparable to Obama. If I were Obama, I would want to meet at a table that includes the Iranian president, but I'd be sure the clergy and the theocracy were at the table, too.

We have an obligation to talk to everybody whether we agree or not. Just talking doesn't mean they will agree on anything, except maybe to talk again.

A: You're the inspiration for the Mike Doonesbury character, but your views are very different from his.

Pillsbury: But not that vastly different from the cartoonist himself. He's a progressive Dem and I'm a Green. But we agree on a lot of things. He's done a wonderful job on Afghanistan. This is for those of us, as Garry [Trudeau, the cartoonist and Pillsbury's college roommate at Yale] and I lived through, seeing the best and brightest send men and women to their death in Vietnam. We're seeing that all over again in Afghanistan. Garry is a very outspoken supporter of Obama, but he's been brutal on his criticism of the current administration's policy in Afghanistan, which makes no sense whatsoever.

To get back to my avatar, I guess what we have in common is that many years ago, Doonesbury supported [Republican Congressman from Illinois] John Anderson when he was running as an independent [for president in 1980]. We have that in common — we both support third parties and see the need for something more than the duopoly of Republicans and Democrats.

A: Will you be running for office again any time soon?

Pillsbury: No.

A: What's next for you?

Pillsbury: I have agreed to take a position as volunteer executive director for a new group, Mediators Beyond Borders (mediatorsbeyondborders.org). The goal is to turn that volunteer position into a paid position.

The two most active projects are in Liberia and in post-Katrina New Orleans and Mississippi. I'll be administrating and fundraising a lot.

People think all we do at Community Mediation is mediation when we do a lot of training on conflict resolution, communication skills, and we also facilitate dialogues. The work we do is broader than the name.

The same is true with Mediators Beyond Borders. We'll be working as trainers and coaches, because ultimately anywhere we go, the conflicts have to be solved by the people involved. The best mediators are the people who speak the same language and understand the nuances that any culture can throw at you. We're trying to avoid the ugly American approach. It's a challenge to see what we'll be able to accomplish. I think it's an open question of how effective it will be ... So it's worth investing my time and energy and seeing if we can make something of it.