The founder of David Hunt and Associates, Washington, D.C., an institution dedicated to citizen empowerment and community development, David Hunt has been organizing for over 20 years. He has led organizing campaigns for better housing and healthcare, including one that resulted in $750 million targeted to low-income housing development in Chicago.
Hunt, a nationally sought after speaker, facilitator, trainer, planner, thinker, and community and organization builder, uses a wide variety of techniques and tools including storytelling to create sacred space where the voices and visions of all that are gathered can be shared and heard.
Hunt is the founder of the Community Building Storytelling Project, a project designed to reintroduce storytelling into American culture as a tool to build community and heal America.
His presentations give insight to the fact that next to the universal laws of physics; absolutely nothing impacts the collective and individual human spirit and its mystical and magical journey more than story.
David’s energetic, charismatic and fun loving spirit creates opportunities for his clients and audiences to reflect, enjoy, learn and grow together as they use story and storytelling to resolve conflict, plan strategically and organize powerfully.
Much of his research, training and methodology were born and nurtured during his three-year, 1995 – 1997, W.K. Kellogg Foundation National Leadership Fellowship.
Hunt has traveled widely around the United States and the globe studying the power of story to heal and build community, or as he likes to say "build common unity". His travel destinations include Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Nicaragua, Bali, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Chiappas, Mexico, Brazil, the Ivory Cost, Ghana, Costa Rica, Ghana, Benin, Spain, Morocco, and many other wonderful places.
Hunt’s own life experiences of facing soul corrupting greed and unchecked brutal power has led him to become a nationally recognized teacher and leader in organizing for social change.
Hunt served for eight years, 1988 -1995, as the Executive Director of the Chicago Rehab Network, a 25-year-old coalition organization of Chicago's community development corporations dedicated to Community Development without Displacement.
Under Hunt's leadership, the Rehab Network led a very successful, broad-based, citywide campaign including over 250 organizations, known as the Chicago Affordable Housing and Community Jobs Campaign, which resulted in the city of Chicago targeting $750 million to low-income housing development.
Since 1998, Hunt has served as one of four principal trainers of the Midwest Academy, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious social change organizing training institutions. Using, among other things, story and storytelling, Hunt has taught thousands the fundamentals of organizing and has won many victories that have brought about meaningful change in people’s lives while giving them a sense of their own power and altering the relationships of power.
As one might imagine, Hunt has a diverse and eclectic client list ranging from national and local foundations and Colleges, to national, state wide and local housing and community development organizations.
Along the journey, Hunt has won many awards in addition to his W.K. Kellogg National Leadership Fellowship: Crain’s Chicago Business “people under forty to watch,” The Chicago Organizers of the Year Award from the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation, as well as the Woods Foundations, and Weiboldt Foundations.
Strategy: How to Organize to Get What You Want; and speaks to Community Building Principles and Applications; Community Organization and Sustainability; and Organizing for Social Equity and Community Rebuilding.