C. Richard Barnes & Associates, LLC is a consulting firm which provides leadership training and development, dispute resolution services, dispute resolution systems design, facilitation, coaching and negotiation skills training to a cross-section of industry, labor, private, public and service organizations, both nationally and internationally.

Prior to forming his company, Richard Barnes was the Executive Director of the W. J. Usery Center for the Workplace at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. For seventeen years preceding his tenure at Georgia State, Richard served as a Federal Mediator with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), with seven of those years in executive management. In his early years, he was an International Representative with the Laborers International Union of North America where he negotiated in excess of 350 labor agreements across 35 separate industries.

In 1998, President Clinton appointed Richard to serve as the 14th Director of FMCS. Once confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he became the first career mediator in FMCS history to receive both the Presidential Appointment and Senate Confirmation, a testament to his vast experience in leadership development, strategic negotiations and dispute resolution processes. His second Presidential Appointment to the National Partnership Council again recognized his commitment and expertise in developing and implementing positive workplace change initiatives.

Richard is an internationally recognized mediator, facilitator, skills trainer and speaker. He served as the facilitator for the Construction Users Roundtable’s (CURT) Tripartite Initiative, an unprecedented forum of construction industry leaders from the owner’s community, national trade organizations and organized labor. Additionally, Richard advances the practice of dispute resolution through his role as a visiting professor at Pepperdine University’s Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution in Malibu, California, as a member of the Board of Advisors of the Institute for Conflict Management at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, as a visiting professor at the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, Arkansas and as an adjunct professor at Kennesaw State University’s Masters of Science in Conflict Resolution Program. Recently, Richard developed a year-long experiential leadership program that was adopted by the Electrical Training Alliance as their national leadership development program. Richard currently serves as the Faculty Chair for this program known as the VOLT Leadership Academy.

A native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Richard is a veteran of the U.S. Army and served three years as an instructor at the Medical Field Service School at Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Richard is a graduate of the U.S. Army’s prestigious Faculty Development Program and as a graduate of Antioch University and the George Meany Center for Labor Studies he holds academic degrees in Labor Studies and Organizational Leadership.