Mediating is ‘part of my personality’: Meet D6 Richmond City Council candidate Shawn Dunning

In Richmond’s political landscape, affiliations and who candidates are aligned with play an important role in getting elected and being able to effectively set policies alongside fellow council members.

In the last 20 years, the Richmond Progressive Alliance has galvanized support for the candidates it endorses, giving those who win a majority vote on the council, as was demonstrated in the 2020 Richmond City Council race.

Yet for District 6 candidate Shawn Dunning, who is challenging RPA-backed incumbent Claudia Jimenez, his goal hasn’t changed from the first time he ran for mayor in 2022. The second-time candidate hopes to leverage his career in conflict resolution and see Richmond evolve past needing such an ideological division.

“I’m the same person on fire trying to bring collaborative leadership into politics,” he told Richmondside. “My approach worked (in 2022). I didn’t get sucked into trying to be position-oriented on anything or saying it’s us versus them. It’s hard for people to understand.”

While he came in second during the 2022 mayoral election, losing to Eduardo Martinez, he got to know how residents felt about the state of the city and what they were unhappy with — running 530 miles around the city and meeting, he says, 5,000 residents face-to-face.

“I learned that actually when I connected with people they were inspired. They want this. I felt like that was a mandate,” he said, referencing the nearly 8,000 votes he won as a first-time candidate. “That’s never happened in Richmond.”

Now, in the midst of his race against Jimenez, Dunning said the council now more than ever needs to move past the political faction that is the RPA — which he says is a larger microcosm of the country’s polarized political viewpoints.

“Even George Washington, the first president, warned us to not go there. ‘Watch out for factions,’ ‘Don’t go to party politics,’ ” he said, quoting Washington. “(RPA) is not a party, but in the concept of how things work around here they function as one. Let’s face it. I don’t represent a faction. I represent my neighbors.”

Dunning knows that his notion of a collaborative process with “everyone at the table,” may turn off voters who believe he is playing the middle ground.

“It takes a while for it to catch on because people don’t trust that,” he said. “That’s not normal in politics. They think I’m just trying to please everyone to get elected.”

What inspires Dunning the most is the possibility of bringing together representatives from the entire community to make it a process that works for everyone — not just one group, no matter how influential they are.

“That’s what I’m most excited about is those meetings and conversations,” he said, noting that he also hopes his opponents, such as the RPA, are at the table. “To me, it’s the Richmond experiment. It’s the perfect laboratory for collaborative problem solving.”

How conflict resolution brought Dunning to Richmond

Dunning was born in San Francisco and spent his childhood in the Grass Valley and Colfax areas at the foot of Sierra Nevada range.

Although he did not know it at the time, his upbringing involving nature, volunteering at organizations such as the Red Cross and being a peer counselor at his high school set the table for his desire to mediate conflicts.

One formative moment that Dunning pointed to was when his high school principal called for him to mediate between two classmates who had gotten into a fist fight.

“It became part of my identity early on,” he said.

After graduating from high school, he studied mechanical engineering at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo where he helped pay his tuition working as a resident advisor in the dorms.

“I would be counseling and coaching people late at night who were distraught that their parents wanted them to be a engineer or architect and that’s not what they wanted and, sure enough, myself, I had a reckoning where it’s like, this mechanical engineering stuff is not feeding my soul,” he said.

He eventually switched majors, to communications and psychology, and found his calling.

“I was never fired up about building better brake pedals and bridges but building bridges between people — that was pretty exciting,” Dunning said.

College became a way for Dunning to experience diversity of thought, race and economic disparity — something that was lacking in the more rural Northern California community of his upbringing.

“It’s not so black and white — no pun intended,” Dunning said. “The lived experience of one to another can be quite different. Yet, when you look at systemic issues, when you look at structural issues, we have come a long way and have a long way to go. Both can be true.” 

After graduating in 1998, he traveled for a year with a nonprofit called “Up With People” — a group featuring multilingual performers traveling the world to promote positive thinking, multiculturalism and racial equality. His travels planted the seed for him to take conflict resolution internationally.

He moved to the suburbs of Washington, DC, in 2001 to attend George Mason where he earned his master’s degree in conflict analysis and resolution while working as an intern and eventually as a part-time staff member for Search for Common Ground — a non-governmental organization dedicated to world peace building.

His passion for adventure-based conflict resolution and his thesis work connected him with an El Cerrito-based organization called Adventure Associates which does team building exercises. He joined the organization as a senior facilitator eventually rising to the level of director.

He was with Adventure Associates for just a couple years before moving back to Washington D.C. to work with Palestinians and Israelis through Search for Common Ground, where he became their global director of leadership and training.

Through his work in conflict resolution, Dunning traveled to areas entrenched in violent conflicts from Middle East wilderness expeditions with Israelis and Palestinians to working with former child soldiers in Sierra Leone. In all of his travels, he said the method to quality resolutions is dependent on the process.

“These are universal things. This is not the Dunning approach to conflict resolution,” he said. “This is human stuff. You have a positive shared experience where you co-create something together.”

After living in Jerusalem from 2012 to 2014, Dunning returned to El Cerrito renting at first before buying a home in Richmond in 2016 — a place he had only heard negative stereotypes of prior to his move.

“Richmond, California, is the longest place I’ve ever been in my adult life,” he said. “I’ve been all over the world — been to 60 countries, 49 states — but I see the world in Richmond. I mean that in every sense of the word, the good, the bad, but all walks of life. I see opportunity.”

Dunning says 2021 council depleted police department staffing

The catalyst, Dunning said, for throwing his hat into the political sphere was when then-council member Martinez quoted Martin Luther King Jr. during a June 15, 2021 meeting. It came during a discussion to implement the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force’s recommendations to seek alternative responses to armed policing. Dunning felt that Martinez had likened himself to the legendary Civil Rights leader.

“I found that so extraordinarily offensive and unrepresentative of our community,” he said. “But that was the night they (the RPA-backed city council members) voted to defund our police department by $3 million.”

Dunning noted that the group initially attempted a $10 million reallocation sent a wrong message to officers and is what he believe led to two dozen Richmond officers either retiring early or leaving Richmond, fueling a gap in police services.

Richmond’s Police Department’s budget, which was about $67.5 million in 2020, or about $82.1 million in today’s dollars when adjusted for inflation, was cut by about $2.3 million in 2021, then cut by an additional $1 million in 2022. Since then, the budget has increased annually. The proposed police budget for 2025 is about $87.2 million.

During that 2021 meeting, the council voted to reallocate funds that would have been spent hiring 12 officers to preventative programs: YouthWORKS; the Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS), which works to reduce gun violence, unhoused intervention services through SOS Richmond; and the Community Crisis Response Program (CCRP). Dunning believes that this depleted police department resources.

“It created an immediate gap in services which led to forced overtime. You don’t want tired cops on the street,” he said.

The issue of public safety constantly comes up in his community conversations, Dunning said. It’s a prime example of the way he can bring all residents to the table so that they feel heard.

Dunning said that the council could have used $30 million in COVID relief funds to start the CCRP instead of taking money from the police —- which in turn disheartened the department.

“Our nationally recognized community-involved, progressive policing model that Obama commended, they decimated it,” he said, adding that residents he’s spoken with have expressed they are more concerned with their safety now than when the city was tallying more than 60 homicides a year in the early-1990s.

In response to those who say he’s a pro-cop politician, Dunning said he was directly recruited to be a Richmond police officer, but three months into the five-month academy stint he was kicked out by an instructor whose ethics he had questioned. He sued Napa Valley College, the academy director, a dean, and the vice president.

The results of the lawsuit was a Writ of Mandate that would have forced the college to give him a hearing. The college eventually settled outside of court with Dunning.

“I can both respect the good cops doing the right things for all the right reasons and hold the bad ones accountable. That’s not a false dichotomy, you can do both,” he said.

He plans to listen, even to the RPA

If elected he plans to constantly listen to residents when discussing topics such as the Chevron $550 million settlement, rent control and the role of the city in supporting all businesses. 

“If a well-organized group like the RPA wants to make a recommendation, I’ll listen to that and always ask what voice is missing. Same with the Chamber of Commerce,” he said. “Let’s get people together who disagree and let’s work on a big, meaningful breakthrough.”

Dunning wants residents to picture a world where both the person who wants less police and the person who wants more police can walk out of the room with a plan they both believe in.

“I’m trying to satisfy the needs of as many people as possible without leaving anyone behind,” he said. “It’s not about supporting just the majority. It’s about everybody.”