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Hope And Healing With Janet Damon

I’m very excited about our guest in this episode. Her name is Janet Damon. Janet and I met when I was in Denver. Janet has a very long history in literacy and libraries. She’s an experienced facilitator. She helps students, families, and community members build reading habits at home. She’s the Founder of Afros and Books, a collective of librarians of color and LGBTQ+ staff who promote self-liberation through libraries. They have a team that’s presented for the Rocky Mountain Early Childhood Conference, Denver Comic Con, and the National Joint Conference of Librarians.

She serves on the Board of Families Forward, The Resource Center, Our Bright World, and SOAR Charter Academy. In her spare time, she’s a City Captain for Black Girls Hike, and dances with Intergenerational Women’s African Drum and Dance Ensemble with her daughters. She writes about multicultural motherhood and a festival blog. We are going to have a great conversation. Welcome, Janet. How are you?

I’m wonderful. I’m so excited to be here with you.

Thank you. I’ve read your bio, and I would love for you to tell everybody out there who you are, where you are from, what your family was like when you were growing up, and what are some of the important points of your life that led you to who you are.

I did have a very unique childhood because my father was in the military. He joined the military and was growing up in a very rural city, Bryan, Texas. He joined at eighteen and went straight to Vietnam. After Vietnam, he came back and then went to Korea. That’s where he met my mother. After they got married and everything, I was born in Germany. All of my childhood was spent on different bases around the world growing up in very inclusive culturally diverse communities. That is truly a part of my identity. Especially in Panama, there were so many different cultures and community folks that informed who I grounded myself.

The other piece was that because we moved so often, every three years, my father, whenever we moved somewhere, his first stop would be to take me to the library. Even as the boxes were still arriving from wherever we had moved from, like Louisiana or what have you, he would help me to find and show me the way to walk to the library. We always looked close enough so I could walk. He would register me for a library card. When I had spare time, I would walk down to the library, and that’s where I would always find ground and anchor myself even in the midst of so much change in my life as we were moving so often.

We came back to Denver when I was in my teens. I went to West High School. I lived in Montbello, but my father taught a JROTC at West High. He did many years in the military and then retired and taught for DPS for several years in high school. On this bus ride from my predominantly African American community, at that time, to West High School, which was a predominantly Latino community, I would see how the city of Denver was so segregated as compared to the places where I grew up in the military.

In the military, you don’t get to choose where you live. You have to live on bases assigned by your father’s rank. I always lived around a diverse group of kids because we were all assigned a spot and made it work. It’s different now to look at the city and how you can draw the lines across Denver by culture and ethnicity. That’s interesting to me having that perspective of not growing up that way.

That’s an interesting story, and you bring up a lot. Part of our approach to the origination point is connecting the things that we do as adults to our experiences as children. Your library story is interesting because I see how you are so engaged in reading in libraries and promoting that. There’s a clear connection to your growing up. It’s almost your happy place or your safe place is going to the library.

Every summer as school was ending, he would ask me what I was intensely curious about. During the summer, he would allow me to spend time thinking about what my curiosity was, then I would be able to research that topic the entire summer. He would check in on me around it, ask me questions, do this big presentation for him, and then we would go out and celebrate with a nice dinner. He has always modeled this intense curiosity and the habit of lifelong learning. He collected books. He invested in the first encyclopedia set from Encyclopedia Britannica. A feature of our home was that we had this knowledge, and it was accessible to me. That was a part of my story.

I want to come back to the curiosity thing because I want to talk more about what you think happens to curiosity when we become educated and go to school. I wanted to make another point about the military, which is interesting because when I’ve spoken with other folks who had a military upbringing, a lot of it was like what you said, “We had to live where we had to live, and it was a diversity of folks. We didn’t get to choose who they were. We had to figure out how to maneuver in different spaces because that’s where we were assigned for that particular three years.”

From my experience as well in Denver, it’s very racially segregated and now, even more socioeconomically segregated. What role does that play in this work that we’re doing in these spaces of equity, diversity, and inclusion? How they’re all connected even to that idea of curiosity? A lot of us as kids were curious, “What is this? Why is that? What is that?” I have 4-year-old and 2-year-old grandchildren.

Whenever I see the four-year-old, that’s where he’s at, “What? Why? Who?” and every question gets followed up. I’m curious about what were some of the values and beliefs. One you mentioned was curiosity. Are there other things that you learned growing up? It sounds like your dad was a pretty influential person in your life. Were there other people along your path that saw something in you, supported you, or were things that were important to you in terms of your values and beliefs?

The place I’m deeply informed with is also my mother. My mother had gone and been born in Korea. At that time, girls were not automatically enrolled in school along with boys. My mother had to advocate for herself from an early age that she wanted to be in school. Her family was like a magistrate family. My grandmother didn’t understand why my mother wanted to go to school. She wouldn’t pay the tuition. My mother would go to school and then say, “I will work. I will clean and sweep. I will pay my own way so I can be here in school.” She was very smart. Other students would ask for her help all the time.

When I think about my mother fighting so hard to have that level of equality in terms of the intersectionality of gender and how even within this community and her family was renowned for their work as a magistrate’s family, still they were producing this barrier for their daughters to have that full attainment of education. That also informs me. My mother always deeply loved to see us do well in school, and it gave her so much pride.

Even later, there were other people who still also modeled for me my value and what I brought to the classroom in terms of my hard work and being. I went to school in Shreveport, Louisiana. I had a teacher there, Ms. Walsh, and she adored me. She loved that I loved to read so much. She was the first person who said, “Would you like to read out loud to the class, Janet?” I said, “Yes.” I read Lady and the Tramp. There was this word that I was reading, and the word was sinister. I said, “There was a sinister,” with an expression or something. She stopped the whole class and said, “Did you see how she read the word sinister?”

I had to move, and we were moving to Colorado. She wrote inside of a book for me how she wanted me to always stay so kind, sweet, generous, and wise, and to keep reading. In all of the deployments that we did after and moving around from place to place, I would always come across that book in the midst of my unpacking. I would always read that message. It ended up becoming another anchor that I carried around who I wanted to be in the world and who I wanted to manifest.

The year after I left Ms. Walsh, I ended up coming here to Colorado and going to Fountain, which is outside of Colorado Springs. In that school, I don’t remember seeing another child of color. When the principal walked me as a new student to my new teacher’s classroom, and I cannot remember her name, she looked at me with an expression of disdain. She assigned me a seat. In the months that we lived there, she would not interact with me. She gave me worksheets. When the class would go to specials, music, and art, she would not take me with the class. She would have me sit in the class by myself.

I remembered that feeling of not being included and belonging in that space. Someone asked me later, “Why didn’t you tell your parents?” I said, “They had so much going on being in this new city anyway. I didn’t want to be a burden to that,” but that teacher informed my practice as much as Ms. Walsh did. Because of that teacher, I always recognized when students felt themselves being excluded in the classroom. I was always very attentive to what that feels like to be set aside, set apart, and othered in that way. It’s interesting how those form the foundations of our practices in the world.

It says a lot about your own personal practices in terms of how you choose to use that. Some people could go through the experience that you described in your Fountain school, and have it be more of a debilitative experience where they would look at it as, “There’s another one of those people that doesn’t like me,” versus, as you said, “I chose to use it to inform my practice.”

A lot of my approach to this work that I do around inclusion and belonging is from that personal perspective. I’ve been guilty myself of creating these false narratives of interactions that I’ve had with people. I don’t know if I was adept as you were as a child to be able to move it into that. This is a great lesson for me to learn because I lived in a victim mentality for a large part of my own life. It took me a while to get to this place where even if it’s something that may seem painful, there’s something that I can learn from.

It even sounds like the foundation that you had with your dad, that first teacher that you described, and your mom’s work ethic and advocacy gave you some extra will to be able to move through this other experience that was exclusive. I could see when you were very young, your dad, your mom, and your early teacher, you were seen versus this experience in Fountain, Colorado where you were not seen and the feelings that were brought up. Let’s talk more about some of those messages that you got. I would also love to hear how you identify yourself when people say, “Tell us about who you are.”

I’ve always thought of you as a leader in my experiences with you, even when I was in DPS. Your name would come up, and people were like, “We need to talk to her. Let’s bring her into the conversation.” I didn’t know all of the things that I’m learning about you now, and I’m still curious about as you were growing up, what were your messages about being a leader. You’ve touched a little bit about how people saw you. Again, I’m curious about what narratives that brought up for you as you think about your own identity and how that has propelled you or created some challenges in your life.

It’s interesting because growing up in a military family, leadership is probably the second word we learn, that everything comes down to values, virtues, and integrity. My father embodied that for me and my mother in a different way. I was blessed to have my mother at the home, but even in the community, my mother always built a vibrant community around being Korean that she would find and locate other people who might be new to the base who spoke Korean. She was always reaching out to people. That’s why I do a lot of connecting with people.

I do co-lead the Women of Color Affinity Group in DPS, and there is this around affinity, belonging, and in service. When we lead in service of our communities, connection, belonging, and interconnectedness, that is when we can truly see the transformation. I hope that this is something that I can pass down to my daughters. When we look at some of the things and the narratives that are told to us, all of them center on how we can create a narrative that creates hierarchies or, in some ways, better because there are all these hierarchies and so forth that come into play.

We truly see the transformation when we lead in service of our communities with connection, belonging, and interconnectedness. Share on X

When we look at ourselves as part of this web or community, in the spirit of Ubuntu that I exist in relation to this community, and I exist because we exist as a community, that’s when we get that strength to lead through hard times because we’re in a relationship. I feel that what propels me in my leadership journey is how I work in service of that connection.

The concept of hierarchy is interesting as you talked about it. It’s almost like when I see a hierarchal structure, there’s an underlying meaning around the place, “Where is your place in the hierarchy?” for people of color, people who identify as not White, and people who are different look at the hierarchy and say, “I belong here.” The narrative is given to us, “This is your station. You have to follow this chain of command,” which I’m sure you’re familiar with being in the military.

There were times in my work life when I bypassed the chain of command. Sometimes I had to apologize for it, and sometimes it worked in my favor. In the organizational culture around Denver Public Schools, it’s what I would call a strict hierarchy. There are these levels, and there’s little flexibility in those. I’m curious how that impacts your ability to lead.

This is what is different when we think about leading through connection and relationships. That is a way that communities of color especially have learned how to navigate the world. The ways that power has historically been set up, it is not always going to work in your favor to go through the approved chain of command. One of the things my dad always has done, and I go back to him because I’ve seen him do this in so many sections, my dad is kind to everyone. Because he is kind to everyone, in the midst of a situation, people are kind to him.

 

I won’t forget one time I had torn my Achilles tendon. I was in pain. I was calling to try to get myself set up for an exam. Denver General said, “We couldn’t see you to even tell you if you tore it for three weeks. After that, it would be six months before we could schedule you for surgery.” I told my dad, “I cannot believe this.” He said, “Who did you talk to?” I said, “I called and talked to the people who schedule.” He said, “Come with me.”

He drove me to this non-descript building in Aurora and said, “We’re not going to go to the front door. We’re going to go through this side door over here.” When he goes in there, all these guys are like, “Joe, how are you?” He says, “My daughter tore her Achilles tendon. She needs to get a set for surgery.” The guy said, “Yes. We can get you in tomorrow at 6:30 AM.”

I carry that into DPS. Sometimes there are some systems that are so complex when we have large organizational cultures that the quickest line is to phone a friend and say, “What’s the best way to navigate?” Within the Affinity group, women will reach out to one another to say, “I’m thinking about this decision. I’m uncertain about this. Who could I talk to?” Part of it is networking so that they can find each other to ask a question that they may not have been able to get resolved.

I had someone reach out, and she’d been trying for several months to get something resolved by going through the protocol for human resources. She just got her teaching license and needed to get it added to the system so she could apply for positions. In two emails, we were able to connect her with someone who scheduled a time to meet and help her. When we think about retaining high-quality candidates of color, sometimes it’s also helping them to navigate systems that they’re unaccustomed to in large organizations.

 

I completely agree with you because I got a lot of stuff done through the relationships that I had with people. When we think about this word around equity and inclusion, it’s all wrapped around connections and the relationships that we have. DPS is not different than a lot of other school districts I’ve worked with around the country where the relational aspect of what is done in academia is secondary to the testing or this assessment-driven culture.

I look at it as relational leadership and how we build a system that is more relational. All the research shows that when you have a strong relationship with a colleague, student, or family, not only do they show up the things that they’re capable of doing but just grow exponentially because of the relationships that we have with each other.

I want to shift a little bit on that and segue into how you are doing through this current Coronavirus crisis because everything was moving along the same way in February 2020. I’m sure most schools were getting ready for that assessment time in March and April, and all of a sudden, we’re sheltering at home for several weeks here in Oregon. They’re starting to open up now. We’ve been home living, working out, working, and doing everything we do together. I’m curious how you, your family, and your work have been impacted, and what you’re sitting with through this amazing time we’re all living through.

I work in educational technology and library services, so I work closely with the team and my director. She has been working to do remote learning. Once we went into the extended spring break, and then the week after, we had to be ready to provide all of this professional development around digital resources. Mine is housed around our very robust eBook and audiobook collection. It’s one of the largest in the nation. It’s training teachers and staff.

In some sessions, there are 200 and 300 educators logging in to get these skills that they haven’t ever had this level of intentional focus. We have to be prepared for remote learning. In the weeks following that, we’re doing some one-on-one coaching, reaching out, and doing some staff development. The one thing that was so interesting to me is how many times I would be on a call and doing a meeting with a teacher to get them onboarded, and they would share that they were experiencing loneliness, especially for folks who might be living alone or might have a family out of state that.

Part of that time was helping them to have a connection or someone to meet with. There were some folks who were going through different changes in life. Maybe their relationship might have been ending and hadn’t had anyone to talk to about things. It’s being fully present for each other as colleagues. It reminded me of a statistic I saw and it was that Cigna did a study around loneliness. Seventy percent experienced these degrees of loneliness. Forty percent of Americans who were surveyed in this particular study by Cigna, and it was 20,000 participants felt that they did not have a very close friend or person in their life that they could talk about personal issues and grievances.

I’ve had the opposite experience in my own personal life because a lot of my work is done virtually in so many different groups and gatherings. I’ve truly benefited through this time. I was in this program to become a certified meditation teacher. It’s being able to have space to integrate my practice. It’s interesting because even in our community, our councilwoman for the district I live in was able to experience a mindfulness session.

She has reached out to have me at all of these city cabinet meetings for her different providers to provide that space and to go through some of those practices. I’ll be honest. I’ve gone to conferences that I would not have been able to. I’ve seen a session with Nikki Giovanni and Angela Davis that truly enriched my life.

It has been pretty amazing to see the amount of networking and opportunities now that we’re all in this digital world for people to share their messages.

It’s been nourishing. I saw some posts on Twitter, and it was like, “For years, we’ve been asking you to provide virtual access to all of these rich conferences and thought leaders, and everyone told us it was impossible. Within 2 to 3 weeks, the entire world globally has been able to make things accessible.” It was an epiphany for me to think about how it has truly been accessible now. I hope that, in some ways, we don’t forget the lessons that COVID is teaching us around that part.

In some ways, let us not forget the lessons that COVID is teaching us around accessibility. Share on X

It’s interesting to see how quickly things can pivot, move, and change when there’s some dire need or there’s something that is coming at us. I remember when I first got on the school board in Boulder in 1997, there was a Latina mom who was talking to me about her children and that community. She said, “If the statistics were different and White kids were achieving at the same level as kids of color, your boardroom would be a war room, and you would deal with this like it’s a crisis.” It had such meaning to me that I still remember it to this day. I could see her sitting in front of me and feel the emotion of having a child who, by the way that she identified, was not getting her needs met in our educational system. It makes me realize that everything can shift.

I had another experience where my son was having a hard time in a math class, and I was on the school board. First, I called the school and then I called downtown in our administrative building. It was amazing because I called, and within an hour, somebody called me back. By the next day, my problem was solved. My son was moved out of the classroom. As I explored more about this teacher, I found out that this was a teacher that four other schools didn’t want and ended up at this particular middle school, which was a place where a lot of teachers that couldn’t make it in other schools went to. That started me on this whole other path.

My point is that when we see how this ability to change, previously, it’s been wrapped around this idea of privilege, which is who you know and whether you can work the system enough. At this point, all of the inequities that we’re seeing in our social service system, healthcare system, and educational system, no one can deny that they’re real anymore.

I’m going to pivot again and say this. What does that mean to you in terms of this next normal for our education? It would be a huge loss if we get to August, and the people at the Federal level just say, “We’re going to start doing our assessments again,” without any discussion about the validity of them and what they’re truly measuring. I’m curious about what some of your thoughts are around this next normal that we’re going into, knowing what we have the ability to do based on what we’ve done through this COVID crisis.

I’m going to speak to two pieces of that. One is that a couple of years ago, I did some soul-searching of my own and said to myself that one of my deep core values is to always determine and reflect on who is the furthest from educational equity in the work that I am doing, and that is where I should begin, whether or not that is working with students who are experiencing homelessness, students who are LGBTQ+ who are advocating to be seen in their schools, curriculum, literature, and collection, students who have neurodiversity, students who are in special education, or students and parents who are experiencing housing or financial instability.

If I can design with that community, at the heart of what the support and work are going to look like, then I will design something where, from working very closely and co-creating, I will learn about where the system failures are existing. It’s learning, listening, and discovering with someone who is experiencing it because no one can tell you all the fault lines of a system like someone who’s fallen through all of them.

No one can tell you all the fault lines of a system like someone who's fallen through all of them. Share on X

That’s a great quote.

I also had to try to climb out. The other part of it is how we develop our own capacity to listen. That’s when we’ve lost in our culture of being so hurried, busy, and multitasking that we have lost the ability to deeply hold someone else’s testimony or lived experience. We have to allow ourselves to carry that in the way that you carried that was said to you in that boardroom where she said, “You would’ve turned this boardroom into a war room to fix this problem,” in 1997, and yet here we are carrying and having this conversation and she’s here with us. People’s testimonies can walk with us on this journey.

Because that design work has influenced my practice, it has allowed me to think about what it looks like for libraries, especially to do service in the midst of this moment like, “What do our programming and virtual programming look like?” I’m excited about all of the levels of engagement that we’re doing around book clubs. We have a Black Dad’s Book Club that’s starting up, and all the fathers are going to do a story time as well as conversations. It’s a book club around their lived experiences and how we make them so that everyone else can listen in and learn from that experience. We’re cultivating a space where people can hear and see one another authentically.

When I think about remote learning, I think about the families that are truly being impacted by not having the networks, accessibility, and technology. That’s historic. That has not come to be right now. That’s an issue that has been years in the making. I saw some work that DPS had and 5,000 students that never showed up at all for remote learning. They never logged on. That right there is our list of where we begin to say, “What is it that we can learn from this moment?”

The other piece is how we continue to dig in and recognize that until all our students have attained none of us have. It doesn’t matter if one half of your boat is up out of the water and the other half is sinking. It is the same ship. In this nation, we’re coming to this realization that because of globalism and interconnectedness, it matters if the store worker who is stocking shelves has childcare, health program, and health equity in the place. It matters because you cannot thrive unless all of our central workers are also thriving. We are at our roots and are interconnected. That shift and deep listening need to happen.

 

I love that lens that you’re bringing because what I’m hearing you say in terms of meeting the needs of the most marginalized is how we create entry points and access for those folks. My additive piece to that is as we do that, it forces the whole systemic structure above and below to have to shift as well. You can’t meet those needs in isolation.

It goes back to John Powell’s work around targeted universalism where you’re creating a solution for a specific group or folks in a specific community, but to fully implement that in a systemic structure, it will impact because it will be something that will result in more access for everyone. That’s an amazing lens. Deep listening has always been something that I believe in that I do better sometimes than others. I understand how important it is.

What I’m hearing you say is we need to talk more about how we take some of what we’ve learned through this pandemic crisis because, in some ways, this next normal is going to have remnants of this for quite a long time. It’s not like we’re going to go through the virus and then everything’s going to be fixed. It’s a lot of rebuilding, restructuring, and reprioritizing. Conversation and deep listening are key. What do you do to heal yourself? What do you do for self-care? What are you hopeful for as we move into this phase of the unknown for all of us?

I am very blessed that I’ve had contemplative practices in my life for a long time. I was very young and nineteen when I went through my own rite of passage with a group of women who practice African dance and drum circles. They held wisdom circles for me when I was going through that age. It was interesting because in our city, Opalanga Pugh is an ancestor now, but she was fundamental in Denver in terms of holding culture and holding our storytelling and dancing. She was that elder sister in my circle. What I learned in that time period allowed me to develop habits of the mind and self-care to even deeply listen to myself to see what it is I need at the moment and what I need to add to my life, whether it is more yoga, more walks, more reading, more art, or more time.

It’s to be able to curate my life around the principles of having fun, creative moments, and also awe. There’s a science around having awe in your life where you have moments that take your breath away. They can be small moments. For example, on my walk, I was walking through a grove of trees and the birds happen to be singing exuberantly. I could stop, pause, and take in all of the beauty that is around me.

It’s recognizing how our own neuroscience is set up that we hold negativity bias and tune in a lot to negativity because the brain is like, “Is this important?” How do I disrupt that? How do I make sure that I’m giving myself nourishment in terms of what I’m taking in, reading, and giving myself so that I can be abundantly resourced? Because of that, I then can be enough and have that resource to give to others. That happens often when people will need support or a listening ear, especially during COVID.

One thing is it’s also showing us that we have not held mindfulness in the regard that it could be in our country. Even major health organizations say they see this coming wave of depression and the diseases of despair around mental health. All of us can take two minutes to breathe, look at our windows, and take in the beauty that is around us.

There are schools that have already lost students to COVID and some students have lost families. I live in the Montello Green Valley. It’s an area that has had a number of COVID-related health impacts. They go hand-in-hand. My practices are around meditation, mindfulness, walking for about an hour daily, and tuning to a lot of shows like yours where I’m helping myself to be more thoughtful, engaged, and do deep listening.

It sounds like you’ve created some great balance because that negativity cycle could go 24/7 if we allow it to. I wake up in the morning and do an hour of yoga, and then I’ll walk my dog throughout the day. I put things off. I find it interesting that in most organizations, schools, corporations, and nonprofits, there’s a lot of discussion about the importance of mindfulness and the importance of self-care, but the actual time that’s given to the adults to do that is minimal. I, like you, hope that as we make this shift into the next normal that it becomes actualized so that you can take two minutes as an adult in a busy work environment and say, “I need to go to the bathroom and breathe for two minutes.” Some days are challenging.

That’s how the days are set up. You have to do that while you multitask.

As we close, anything else that you want to share? How can people find you? You have a website, and maybe you can tell folks how to stay in touch with you. I saw that there’s an opportunity for a newsletter, so I would love to let you tell people how to reach out to you and get in touch with you, and then I’ll have one final question for you.

Afros and Books is on Facebook and Instagram as well as Twitter. I’m on Twitter, @MixxMomma as a biracial woman. I also have a website called Raising the Revolution. That one is about how we nurture critical consciousness in our children and our youth so that they’re able to navigate the world with compassion, recognize, and hold space for complexity. Those are the best ways to reach me. This is a generative time for me.

I’m finding that as well once I got through my initial feelings of loss. It’s becoming more generative. What do you want to be known for? What do you want your legacy to be in terms of who you are as Janet Damon?

I’m known already as the library lady or who you go to for books. In my sisterhood in Afros and Books, we joke around that our goal after we retire is to buy this huge bookmobile and have a lending library as well as a DJ booth and just engage. I want people to live a healthy life of the mind, connect with historical and ancestral knowledge, and read and continue to cultivate a life that they love. Reading is a part of that. I do want my legacy to be around literacy as liberation and libraries in service of liberation. All of these ideas matter.

Literacy as liberation and libraries in service of liberation does matter. Share on X

I love literacy as liberation. I want to thank you. You’ve been reading about Janet Damon, who is a Denver, Colorado resident, and an all-around amazing person, both in her quest to provide support, reading, and libraries to everybody, not just for students. It’s for the whole community. She’s also putting a large level of mindfulness and relationship-building into everything that she does. I want to thank you again. It was a real treat to spend a little bit of time with you. With that, see you all again next time. Have a great day.

Thank you so much, Bill.

 

Important Links

• Afros and Books
• Black Girls Hike
• Intergenerational Women’s African Drum and Dance Ensemble
• Lady and the Tramp
• Facebook – Afros and Books
• Instagram – Afros and Books
• @MixxMomma – Twitter
• @BilldelaC – Twitter
• @BilldelaC – Instagram
• Bill de la Cruz – Facebook