The history keeps returning.
What remains unresolved finds its way into the present.
CounterStories Consulting
Renewed Language.
Restored Alignment.
Reclaimed Dignity.
CounterStories helps institutions, communities, and leaders confront inherited harm, transform entrenched conflict, and create a shared path forward.
Meet DavidWhen the usual approaches aren’t enough
When the problem is bigger than the people currently in the room.
Sometimes the conflict in front of you did not begin with the people now being asked to solve it.
Institutions inherit histories, loyalties, structures, wounds, language, and ways of working.
Over time, those histories can surface as leadership tension, recurring conflict, stalled initiatives, fractured trust, mission fatigue, or an inability to agree on what should come next.
And sometimes the invitation is not a problem at all. It is a sense that something more is possible, but the language, relationships, or conditions needed to reach it have not yet taken form.
That is often where David’s work begins.
The institution cannot find alignment.
People share a mission but struggle to see a path they can take together.
The usual interventions haven’t shifted the pattern.
The conversation changes; the underlying tension remains.
More than conflict management
The conflict may not be the problem.
It may be revealing the problem.
Many valuable approaches begin with the visible issue.
Mediation may help resolve a dispute.
Strategy may clarify direction.
Coaching may strengthen leadership.
Facilitation may create a more civil conversation.
These approaches can be valuable.
But when the underlying narratives remain unchanged, even good work can remain bounded by the same horizon of possibility.
A strategy can reproduce assumptions inherited from the past.
A leader can become more effective while still operating inside a narrative no one has learned to question.
A conversation can become more productive without changing what people believe is actually possible.
CounterStories asks a different question:
Which narratives are shaping what people can currently see, imagine, and do?
The work helps surface and reshape those deeper narratives so mediation, strategy, leadership, dialogue, and action can operate from a wider field of possibility.
“You tried resolution. I offer transformation.”
The CounterStories approach
Three movements toward a preferred future.
Every engagement is shaped around the context in front of us, but the work often moves through three interconnected movements.
01
RECKON
Legacy Reckoning
02
OPEN
Conflict That Opens, Not Closes
03
IMAGINE
A Narrative of a Shared Future
Not a future without struggle — a future people can find reason to struggle toward together.
The work creates language for belonging, shared meaning, trustworthy partnership, and a future people can recognize themselves within and participate in shaping.
Work with David
The work takes different forms.
Some institutions need one consequential conversation. Others need sustained accompaniment through a deeper transformation.
Strategic Convenings
When the moment needs a different kind of conversation.
Institutional Transformation
When the work needs time to become something people can actually live.
Leadership Advisory
When carrying the moment requires somewhere to think honestly.
Organizational Skill Building
When the moment suggests the work needs to continue after David leaves the room.
Speaking & Learning
When an idea needs to enter a larger room.
Selected experience
Four decades inside the kinds of situations that resist simple answers.
Stories from the work
What does this look like in practice?
When community engagement stopped being something done to people and became something built with them.
Community Power & Trust in Atlanta
Annie E. Casey Foundation
Let’s begin
What brings you here?
You do not need a perfectly defined problem or a finished brief.
In fact, it may be useful not to arrive with the challenge already fixed in place.
Maybe something needs attention.
Maybe something keeps returning.
Maybe a transition is opening new questions.
Or maybe you can sense a possibility that has not yet found enough language or form.
Tell David what you are noticing.