ABOUT DAVID
The work has taken many forms. The question beneath it has remained.
David Anderson Hooker’s work has developed across decades, disciplines, institutions, communities, classrooms, courts, congregations, public processes, and international contexts.
The questions have traveled with him.
So has the practice.
David’s work has been shaped by years of asking what becomes possible when people are willing to look beyond the visible issue and attend to the narratives, histories, relationships, structures, and possibilities underneath it.
THE FORMATION OF THE WORK
The work was formed across disciplines that are often kept apart.
David’s practice does not come from one professional tradition.
It has been formed at the intersection of many.
LAW
Law taught him to pay attention to structure, accountability, consequence, and what systems recognize as justice.
MEDIATION & CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION
Mediation and conflict transformation taught him that resolving the immediate dispute does not necessarily transform the conditions that produced it.
RESTORATIVE PRACTICE & TRAUMA HEALING
Restorative practice and trauma healing deepened his attention to harm, relationship, repair, participation, healing, and the people most affected by what happened.
THEOLOGY & SPIRITUAL FORMATION
Theology and spiritual formation shaped how he thinks about dignity, covenant, belonging, responsibility, and the moral imagination required to live differently together.
FACILITATION & DIALOGUE
Across different approaches to dialogue, facilitation techniques, and participatory practices, David learned how much becomes possible when people are invited into a different quality of conversation.
COMMUNITY-BASED WORK
Community-based work taught him that expertise is not always located where formal authority sits — and that people living inside a context often carry knowledge that no outside framework can replace.
PUBLIC POLICY & INSTITUTIONAL WORK
Public policy and institutional work exposed him to the ways systems, history, power, and narrative can shape what people believe is possible long before a meeting begins.
EMBODIED PRACTICE, THEATER & EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
Embodied practice, theater, and experiential learning offered ways of seeing patterns that words alone may not reveal.
LEADERSHIP & SYSTEMS THINKING
Leadership and systems thinking strengthened his ability to look beyond individual behavior toward the relationships, structures, incentives, narratives, and conditions holding a larger pattern in place.
None of these disciplines contains the whole practice.
Together, they have shaped how David listens, discerns, designs, convenes, and accompanies change.
A PRACTICE BUILT OVER TIME
Some practices were learned.Some were adapted.Some were developed through the work itself.
David does not arrive with a single proprietary model and fit every situation inside it.
Over more than four decades, he has learned, used, adapted, refined, and combined practices from many traditions.
And in some of his longest engagements, entirely new pathways emerged from the work itself.
COMING TO THE TABLE
The Coming to the Table work helped produce the Transforming Historical Harms methodology.
GREENSBORO COUNTERSTORIES PROJECT
The Greensboro CounterStories Project became the context in which Transformative Community Conferencing emerged.
SOUTH SUDAN / MORNINGSTAR
The work in South Sudan contributed to the development of the Morningstar framework.
The work does not only apply frameworks.
Sometimes the work creates pathways that other people can continue using.
WHY COUNTERSTORIES
Because the narratives people are living inside matter.
A strategy can be sound and still reproduce the past.
A mediation can resolve a dispute while leaving the deeper narrative untouched.
A leader can grow in skill while still operating inside assumptions no one has learned to question.
A room can have a productive conversation and still remain bounded by the same horizon of possibility.
David’s work increasingly came to focus on the narratives shaping what people, communities, institutions, leaders, and systems believe can happen next.
CounterStories grew from the conviction that transformation sometimes requires more than solving the visible problem.
It requires changing the conditions from which people imagine what is possible.
HOW DAVID HOLDS THE WORK
Consulting is the engagement.Covenant is how David holds the work.
A contract may define the engagement.
It cannot fully describe the relationship required to do consequential work well.
David approaches the work with a commitment to dignity, responsibility, honesty, mutuality, and care for what people entrust to the process.
That does not mean avoiding tension.
It means holding the work seriously enough to remain in relationship when tension appears.
Covenant, in this sense, is not a promise that everyone will agree.
It is an invitation — and a commitment — to stay in the circle, stay at the table, and remain on the path together when the work becomes difficult.
It is a commitment to how people will remain present to one another while doing difficult, consequential, and possibility-making work.
WHAT EXPERIENCE HAS TAUGHT HIM TO NOTICE
The question is not only what David has done.It is what those experiences have taught him to notice.
Across his career, David has moved through law, academia, philanthropy, public policy, faith communities, mediation, community transformation, justice work, international practice, and teaching.
The value of that range is not simply breadth.
It is the ability to recognize patterns across contexts that are often treated as unrelated.
A conflict inside a leadership team may carry a narrative pattern that also appears in a community.
A justice process may reveal something about memory and belonging.
A strategic planning conversation may actually be constrained by an older story about identity or possibility.
An emerging tension may be less a problem to eliminate than an invitation to notice what wants to become different.
The breadth of David’s experience allows him to listen across categories rather than being trapped inside one.
A LIVING PRACTICE
The work is still evolving.
CounterStories is not the culmination of a finished methodology.
It is a living practice.
Each engagement brings different histories, different people, different conditions, and different possibilities.
Sometimes the work confirms what David already knows.
Sometimes it requires a familiar practice to be adapted.
And sometimes the situation teaches something that becomes useful far beyond the original engagement.
That ongoing evolution is part of the practice itself.
A DAVID-LED PRACTICE
David leads CounterStories directly.
His experience, judgment, relationships, and way of seeing remain at the center of the work.
When an engagement requires additional expertise, perspective, cultural knowledge, research, facilitation capacity, or other forms of support, trusted collaborators may be invited into the process.
The work expands around what the moment requires.
It is not handed off to a standing consulting team.
The team follows the work — not the other way around.
SELECTED EXPERIENCE
Four decades across rooms where simple answers were rarely enough.
David’s authority comes not only from the institutions associated with his career, but from the range of environments in which he has been asked to listen, interpret, design, convene, teach, and help people move.
- University of Notre Dame — Kroc Institute
- Annie E. Casey Foundation
- State of Georgia
- U.S. Nuclear Waste National Dialogue
THE QUESTION THAT KEEPS RETURNING
The work keeps asking the same deeper question.
Not simply:
How do we resolve what is in front of us?
But:
What are we being asked to understand, release, repair, carry forward, or make possible together?
That question has followed David across disciplines, communities, institutions, public processes, and decades.
CounterStories is the current home for that work.