Until late last year, Ingrid Lundberg, a partner at Downtown firm Dickie, McCamey & Chilcote, had not been outside the United States since the mid-1970s when she visited family in Norway. But when Robert Creo, a lawyer she knew from their shared specialty in mediation, suggested she join him on an 11-day trip to Africa where they would teach mediation skills at a refugee camp in Ghana, "I said yes before I thought about it," recalled Ms. Lundberg.

With her own children grown and donations from her law firm to help pay expenses for the trip, "It was my turn to give back," said Ms. Lundberg.

She and Mr. Creo, whose practice is based in Morningside, are founding members of Mediators Beyond Borders, a year-old, non-profit organization based in Pittsburgh that uses conflict resolution skills to promote peace and reconciliation.

Mr. Creo has practiced mediation since 1979 and served as an arbitrator for a wide range of cases involving parties as diverse as the Major League Baseball Players Association and the National Association of Securities Dealers. Besides his private practice, he has taught mediation skills at Chatham University and the law schools at Duquesne University and the University of Pittsburgh.

But in recent years he was motivated to shift his mediation skills from purely commercial and business purposes, "to a humanitarian level."

"For small amounts of money, we can have a huge impact," he said of Mediators Beyond Borders, which is headquartered at his law office. "For peace, you need law to resolve conflicts … or else people will just make decisions using force or AK-47s."

Mr. Creo drew up an organizational plan for the group after reading an article by Kenneth Cloke, a California-based mediation expert whom Mr. Creo described as "a cutting-edge thinker."

"He had the idea we should be using our mediation and conflict resolution skills to further world peace and bigger issues than single problems."

Mr. Creo began laying out a strategy for the group early in 2007 and helped to recruit its original 150 members -- including arbitrators, mediators and professional counselors -- from across the United States and other countries.

Originally called Mediators Without Borders, like the well-established Doctors Without Borders, the group changed its name because of technical issues associated with the medical organization and, "because we felt the word 'beyond' was more in tune with our mission and approach: to be more transformative, to move beyond our comfort zone," said Mr. Creo.

The group targeted the Buduburam refugee camp in West Africa as its first international project in part because Mr. Creo was familiar with on-going research at the University of Pittsburgh involving former child soldiers like the several hundred who live among an estimated 40,000 refugees at the Ghana settlement camp. The refugees fled the Liberian civil wars that occurred between 1989 and 2003.

The United Nations opened the Buduburam camp in 1990 but pulled out of camp administration last year. The Liberian refugees were given a June 2007 deadline to return to their homelands, but many have yet to do so. The mediators hope to provide training for the former young soldiers and other settlers to resolve issues they face as they resettle their native countries.

"They are incredible survivors," said Ms. Lundberg. "They are just fighting to exist and find tools to solve conflict without violence."

During the organization's initial visit to the Buduburam camp in late November and early December, Ms. Lundberg was among a team of five professionals who presented 24 hours worth of basic mediation training to 60 refugees.

Prabha Sankaranarayan, a mediator and counseling specialist from Upper St. Clair, who is also a founding member of Mediators Beyond Borders and part of the team that went to Ghana, said the trainers used role playing and small-group practice sessions to show the refugees how to handle disputes.

Mr. Creo expects to travel to Ghana again this year, perhaps in March, to assess the refugees' further needs and to try to rebuild a law school in Liberia. "Civil war destroyed that; and you can't have a society that is lawless." He will seek donations from law firms of used laptop computers for students and staff at the Liberian law school.

Members of Mediators Beyond Borders pay dues of $365 annually, Ms. Sankaranarayan said, but are trying to raise much larger sums to carry out projects in the planning stages in places as far flung as Nicaragua, Nepal and Katrina-ravaged areas in New Orleans and Mississippi.

Closer to home, Mediators Beyond Borders is developing a project at Arsenal Middle School in Lawrenceville. The aim is to prevent ethnic violence in the community where refugees from Somalia have lived since 2004.

Reflecting on the global reach that Mediators Beyond Borders hopes to achieve, Mr. Creo said it's ironic the organization is based in an office in the neighborhood where he grew up, right across the street from his former elementary school.

"My second grade teacher always told me I wouldn't get far in life."