City of Smyrna Racial Trust Building Initiative: Breakfast Speaker Series
As part of the city's Racial Trust Building Initiative, the City of Smyrna is hosting its second Breakfast Speaker Series on Tuesday, March 7th at the Smyrna Community Center. The Breakfast Speaker Series invites qualified guest speakers to engage audiences in community issues.
Dr. David Anderson Hooker will be speaking on transforming historical harms.
Registration is free and open to the community. Breakfast will be served. Attendance is limited, so please register to reserve your spot.
Eventbrite registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/racial-trust-building-initiative-breakfast-speaker-series-tickets-520545996087
Date: March 7, 2023
Time: 7:30-9:00 a.m.
Location: Smyrna Community Center (Magnolia Room) - 200 Village Green Circle, Smyrna, GA
If you have any questions, please contact Christy Ullman at cullman@smyrnaga.gov.
Speaker Bio:
David Anderson Hooker is a lawyer and former community psychologist with more than 35 years’ experience as a mediator, trainer, and community builder. He currently serves as the Founder and Principal Narrator for CounterStories Consulting, LLC in Atlanta, Georgia. From 2016 - 2021 Hooker served as Professor of Practice for Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, which is an integral unit of the Keough School of Global Affairs. For five years prior to joining the Kroc Institute (2010-2015), he served as Senior Fellow for Community Engagement Strategies at the University of Georgia’s Fanning Institute for Leadership Development.
For more than 20 years Hooker has worked in communities and world regions experiencing intense or intractable conflict including Bosnia, Southern Sudan/Northern Uganda, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Somalia. In the United States he served as Community Engagement Advisor to the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi (Oxford) in its Decade of Dialogue to Undo Racism in Mississippi and established the Greensboro (NC) CounterStories Project, which is currently working to conduct city-wide dialogues to address police community relationships. Hooker helped to establish and train community organizers in five regions of that State to conduct multi-racial dialogue and conduct local analysis leading to local actions to address issues of racial inequity. Hooker also served as the founding Director of Research and Training for Coming to the Table – Healing Historical Harms (CTTT). The CTTT project originally connected “linked” descendants of former enslaved and former enslavers from the same plantation systems in dialogue processes. The project expanded to consider methods of engagement for any community divided by historical trauma.
Hooker’s experiences with various racial healing approaches including Coming to The Table, The National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI), The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance Program as well as his years as a Civil Rights litigator, Assistant Attorney General for the State of Georgia, and his experience as the Vice President of Community Building for the Annie E. Casey Foundation Center for Working Families, Inc. (Atlanta GA) have called him to seek a new approach to uncovering the structural and discursive factors in a community that result in and reproduce racially (and other identity – based) constructed inequities. He is the author of The Little Book of Transformative Community Conferencing (SkyHorse 2016) and Transforming Historical Harms (Eastern Mennonite 2012) and many chapters, articles and workbooks about conflict, trauma healing, and the role of narrative in identity.
