Teacher, Consensus Builder and Advocate Frank Dukes Talks with Guy and Heidi Burgess About Balancing Those Three Roles
Newsletter 369 - July 17, 2025
Note: All our newsletters are also available on the BI Newsletter Archive.
Guy Burgess and I (Heidi Burgess) talked with Frank Dukes on May 23, 2025. Frank is a mediator, consensus builder and advocate who practices and teaches at the University of Virginia. He works on a dozen or so collaborative change projects each year--involving the environment and land use, water, historic landscapes, community development, education, and health. He has also intensified his emphasis on race and equity, using a strategy he calls "equitable collaboration" -- work that emphasizes relationship and is trauma-informed, inclusive, responsive, truth-seeking, deliberative, and adaptive to organizational and community needs and circumstances. We talked to Frank about what these ideas mean, how he balances his three roles, and more. If you are interested in watching, listening to, or reading the full interview, go to Frank Dukes Full Interview. A few of you might also be interested in listening to or reading the transcript of the interview that Julian Portilla did with Frank in 2003. You can see how his practice has changed over the intervening 20 years—and how it has stayed the same.
We started our conversation with Frank by talking about the presentation we made for the Environment and Public Policy (EPP) Section of the Association for Conflict Resolution, which Frank had attended. In that session, we made the argument that mediators and consensus builders (which make up the bulk of the members of ACR) were in a particularly strong position to help America and Americans diminish their divides and start working together more effectively to solve our joint problems. We argued that the members of the EPP section were particularly well-suited to that kind of activity. However, we noted, some mediators have taken on more of an advocacy role when it comes to the U.S. political divide, usually (though certainly not always) siding with the Democrats against the Republicans, and particularly against Trump himself.
Choosing whether to act as a neutral or an advocate (or when to do each) is a difficult choice for many people in this field. We were particularly interested in talking to Frank about that balancing act, as he actually plays three roles simultaneously: teacher, practitioner, and advocate. To our surprise, he said that he hadn't thought about that specifically, but he had been giving quite a lot of thought about whether he was spending his time in the best possible way.
I hadn't thought of that specifically, even though I think very seriously about the teaching role. I am very scrupulous about not injecting my views into my teaching. I want my students be able to think for themselves, rather than me spoon-feeding them and creating people that think the way that I do. I would never talk about voting for a particular candidate. And that's just sort of the baseline minimum.
But, at the same time, Frank does base his teaching on his work as a consensus builder, which has some elements of advocacy in it.
I'm actually much more comfortable with the boundary between teaching and advocating: I'm not telling them what to do and what to think, or who to vote for, or anything that would give them any indication of how I feel about that. However, I do understand that, in the current world—this might not have been the same way three decades ago or two decades ago—but now, if you're talking about collaboration, if you're talking about equity, asking how is the process equitable? If you're talking about being "trauma informed," if you're talking about history, then that's going to be seen as one particular kind of politics. So I'm not naive. I understand that that's the case. But I'm not changing that part of it. ...
We have done a lot of work around monuments and public spaces and equity was really an important consideration for that. And then we realized that a lot of what we were doing, the way we were framing that, was going to be helpful for other work that we're doing.
So, for instance, becoming trauma-informed. 10 years ago, we didn't really talk about that. But over the last 10 years, we've been very specifically mentioning there are histories of trauma that people are bringing to public issues. Pretty much every inch of this country has been contested and has some elements of trauma. And oftentimes, people are bringing those traumas to the consensus process. In other words, they're not necessarily able to bring their whole selves the way that they would like to, to the issues. They're not able to control their emotions. They're not able to regulate themselves. ... Almost all of our projects, whether it's housing, community development, environmental contamination, watershed protection, whatever. Almost all of them have some dimension of past trauma. ...
Frank acknowledged, however, that this type of work can put agency officials in a bind.
On the one hand, we've got this enormous push back against diversity, equity, and inclusion. But on the other hand, certainly before George Floyd, but definitely after George Floyd, so many public agencies are way more aware of histories of race and racism and other harms than they were before. And they want to be able to address them appropriately. ... I feel for the agencies that know that if they're dealing with public issues, they've got to address these issues, while at the same time, they're being told by their bosses that they can't use the words "diversity" or "equity" or "inclusion"— not even inclusion! That is a prime element [of equitable collaboration].
In addition to being trauma-informed and inclusive, equitable collaboration is responsive, deliberative, truth-seeking and adaptive. Deliberative, Frank explained, "is the idea that we have something to learn from each other." Truth-seeking, particularly in the environmental arena, involves fact-finding, but it is broader than that too. "People are often bringing many truths [to the process]." "How do we help surface those truths?" Frank asks.
Adaptive means that they adapt their process to the needs of the problem, the setting, and the people. They don't come in with a standard process and use the same one for everything.
Frank agreed with our assertion that there is a need for third parties in our political climate, and particularly in the community and public policy arena.
We still have very human responses to work with. The fundamental attribution error and so many other ways that people respond to difference sets people up to say "these are our enemies." In those cases, a third party can be very helpful. We have been very helpful at helping break down those barriers. So there is as much or more of a need for that now than there was before.
However, Frank pointed out, hyper-polarization isn't the only problem. So, too, are substantive concerns, human rights concerns, and the actions of bad-faith actors.
I know you all aren't doing this, but it's so easy to kind of fetishize polarization as being the problem, without removing it from the substantive concerns, as though we could just get rid of the polarization, and the differences in the human rights values that people have are not as significant. ... When you have people who are being kidnapped and thrown into prisons across different countries, when you have leaders who are absolutely willing to lie, and people are trying to destroy the constitutional balance of power. To me, with polarization, if you're only focused on that, you're going to be missing a huge part of the screen.
Bad actors are becoming institutionalized and are being centered in one political party, which I hate to say, because I've had plenty of Republicans who were great participants and leaders in the work that we've done over the years. And in so many community issues.
However, the work that Frank does, he explained, is often not politicized. Most of his work involves state and community issues, "things like data centers and solar farms and transitions in coal mining country."
These issues can become politicized, but for most people, they're not. They're not partisan issues. They're substantive issues and the differences don't align themselves very readily along political lines. So that's one reason why I think that the work we do is still so critically important, why we still need that third-party function to be able to function effectively.
One of the big challenges he sees in his work involves worldviews and fact finding.
People are getting information from varied sources. I'm subject to information that's totally incorrect or is exacerbating something. Of course, there's always been people taking personal advantage from false information that they're using. But I don't know that it's ever paid so much to so many people to get clicks and views by spreading things that are completely untrue, but generate fear and attention. So they [bad-faith actors] have been able to monetize hate and monetize untruth and that feels like such an enormous project. At the community level, I'll participate in things like that or help facilitate things like that [to help address this problem.]
But it doesn't address the bigger question of social media, and the media generally, and the idea that there is a group of powerful people who are trying to eliminate, or are doing things that are unconstitutional, undemocratic, and that are hurting lots of different people.
And so I'm wondering, is the way I'm spending my time useful? Is this the way that I want to be spending my time? And my answer is, I try to do everything, which is not a happy answer. But it may be a necessary answer. And oddly enough, I've not lost clients, as I've done more work on human rights advocacy. It hasn't spilled over into people not hiring me --it is really kind of the opposite. I've gotten more work along the lines of really divisive issues, oftentimes by people who will give me credibility because I've spoken out against some harm that was being done. So, I've been very cautious in my career about that. And I still don't do advocacy on anything really environmental, because so much of our core of our work is environmental. But on issues involving human rights, I'm pretty outspoken.
Frank went on to talk about the difference between "calling people out" and "calling people in," a distinction popularized by Loretta Ross in her book Calling In: How to Start Making Change with those you'd Rather Cancel.
For people like myself who have so many different privileges of race and gender and education and economic stability and so forth, I see that as more of my duty—to call people in. But I need to support the people who are doing the calling out at the same time. So that's a challenge. It is definitely a challenge to do both, and sometimes it drives me a little bit crazy.
I think I am, though, much more naturally the peacebuilder, the third party. I can see different sides. I really want people to be able to understand each other. I understand that for us to have an effective society that can deal with our issues and deal with our inequities, and deal with our history, we have to have that capability to have effective conversations that are inclusive of people with many, many different views.
And I've done that successfully enough around specific issues, for instance, tobacco and coal mining and other things that are heavily polarizing. There is value in doing that and that people can build relationships and new alliances and new understandings which can change how they are approaching issues. At the same time, I feel I need to strengthen my advocacy chops and strengthen my facilitation and mediation ability and strengthen both communities at the same time, which is a little bit disconcerting to be doing. ...
So, I'm still doing that [mediation and facilitation] work and still see the value in that work. But again, I'm also continuing to question myself, asking "is this the best use of my time, given threats you know that are happening to people?" I wish there were 10,000 people that were doing this type of work instead of the small group that is -- you probably know everybody or all the groups that are doing this kind of work.
While we do know a lot of people, we pointed out that there are, very likely, more than 10,000 people who are doing this type of work, but their work is not as well known as it needs to be. We talked about how to solve that, and we talked about many more things we don't have space to cover here. So to get it all...
Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!
In order to prevent bots, spammers, and other malicious content, we are asking contributors to send their contributions to us directly. If your idea is short, with simple formatting, you can put it directly in the contact box. However, the contact form does not allow attachments. So if you are contributing a longer article, with formatting beyond simple paragraphs, just send us a note using the contact box, and we'll respond via an email to which you can reply with your attachment. This is a bit of a hassle, we know, but it has kept our site (and our inbox) clean. And if you are wondering, we do publish essays that disagree with or are critical of us. We want a robust exchange of views.
About the MBI Newsletters
BI sends out newsletter 2-3 times a week. Two of these are substantive articles. Once a week or so we compile a list of the most interesting reading we have found related to our topics of interest: intractable conflict, hyper-polarization, and democracy, and we share them in a "Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links” newsletter. These links include articles sent by readers, information about our colleagues’ activities, and news and opinion pieces that we have found to be of particular interest. Each Newsletter will be posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.
If you like what you read here, please ....