It’s easy to imagine Damon Azali-Rojas in a battlefield tent, offering practical but eloquent counsel. He’d be the young officer with the surprisingly long view of history.
Come back to reality and you’ll find him advising high school students who are trying to reform punitive school policies or mentoring an overwhelmed activist blaming herself for not having enough time and energy to do it all.
In his work as a coach/facilitator at Liberty Hill’s Wally Marks Leadership Institute and for Liberty Hill’s initiative to improve the lives of boys and men of color, Damon shares nuts-and-bolts advice as well as providing the solid reassurance that can keep organizers going when they are up against enormous odds. Damon provides similar leadership as Director of Field Operations for Jemmott Rollins Group, Inc., a consulting firm that works to strengthen grassroots community groups.
As a coach and mentor to up and coming organizers, Damon shares lessons learned from personal experience and inspiration from past social justice struggles. “Mentorship and coaching is the core skill that a community organizer has to learn,” he says, “having conversations that help develop peoples’ consciousness and skills so that they will be able to change their own lives and the lives of their families, their communities and the world.”
When asked about ideas that inspire his own thinking, he is quick to quote a line from novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “'She understood that in this business she had to be a chess player, not a boxer punching at the world.' It highlights the need for deliberate and proactive, long-term strategy for change, not a series of actions that flail about reacting to each new attack," he says.