Inspiring Conversations with Christina Damon of Sankofa Educational Consulting and Advocacy

Today we’d like to introduce you to Christina Damon.

Hi Christina, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I see my involvement with teaching and education as part of my ancestral legacy. I am a third-generation Black educator in Denver, standing on the foundation my grandfather and mother built, together contributing nearly 50 years of service to Denver Public Schools (DPS). I was raised and educated in the neighborhoods of Park Hill, Montbello, and Green Valley Ranch, and as a graduate of DPS myself, I carry both the brilliance of my community and the responsibility to confront the inequities I witnessed growing up.

My love for advocacy began in high school when I joined the policy debate team. Competing locally and nationally, I found my voice in speaking truth to power which is a skill that would shape my entire career. After college, I knew exactly where I needed to be which was back at my high school, serving the community that raised me. Over the past 14 years, I have worked as a paraprofessional, special education teacher, instructional coach, and gifted education teacher. In every role, I sought opportunities to advocate for students and to build deep, meaningful connections with families.

That ethos led me to found Sankofa Educational Consulting and Advocacy. Sankofa is a powerful Akan word and Adinkra symbol meaning “to go back and fetch it.” Whether represented as a mythical bird looking backward while moving forward, clutching an egg, or as a spiraled heart, Sankofa reminds us that wisdom and strength come from remembering and reclaiming ancestral knowledge as we step into the future. The symbol embodies humility, reflection, and respect for ancestry, and it teaches us that true progress emerges by honoring history while building toward a liberatory future.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The journey has been rich with meaning, though not without challenges. When I launched Sankofa Ed, I was stepping into entrepreneurship as both a former classroom teacher and a new mother. My daughter was only two months old when I began formalizing my business and nine months old when I officially launched. Motherhood became both the anchor and the catalyst for this leap. It gave me the courage to imagine a different path where I could create a motherhood experience that allowed me to spend more time with my daughter while also modeling what sovereignty looks like: the freedom to choose, the courage to trust yourself, and the power to create the life you desire. For me, that has meant choosing courage again and again and taking full accountability for each step forward.

Balancing parenting and entrepreneurship has required long nights, sacrifices, and a constant willingness to trust myself in new ways. Being a Black woman solopreneur means carrying forward a legacy of innovation, resourcefulness, and vision. I come from a lineage of educators and community builders who often created something out of very little, and that same spirit shapes the way I lead my work today. Entrepreneurship has challenged me to stretch, adapt, and imagine new solutions, while also giving me the freedom to design work rooted in my values.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
At its core, Sankofa Educational Consulting and Advocacy is about partnership, trust, and integrity. We walk alongside families as allies in challenging systems that have historically marginalized students with disabilities, especially students of color with disabilities. Our work includes advocacy in IEPs and 504s, equity-focused support around discipline, and coaching for parents, all through a culturally responsive and trauma-informed lens. Families tell us we make the process more accessible and less intimidating by breaking down complex language, centering student strengths, and ensuring their voices are heard with clarity and respect.

What distinguishes Sankofa Ed is not only the services we provide, but the values that guide them. Our advocacy process is highly collaborative from start to finish. We review documents together with parents to unpack clinical language, deficit-based framing, and pathologizing descriptions, and co-create a narrative that uplifts both the student’s intellectual dignity and the parent’s lived experience. This approach ensures that families are active partners in the process whose knowledge and insights drive the process.

Our practice is also rooted in community-centered data justice which is the belief that data should be used to affirm rather than harm. In our advocacy, this means recognizing how data and data-driven practices can either reinforce inequities in special education or help dismantle them. Data justice applies the principles of social justice to the data-driven world, advocating for equitable collection and use of information that benefits communities rather than deepening existing inequalities. It calls us to critically examine how data has historically been used to pathologize children with disabilities, reinforce deficit-based narratives, or justify exclusionary practices.

We use data as a tool for transparency, accountability, and agency and work with families to ensure their children’s stories are told with dignity, their brilliance is made visible, and systemic inequities are brought to light. At the heart of this work is listening. I believe listening is the root of all ethics because only when we truly hear families and students can we honor their dignity and respond to the layered stress they carry. For families of color who also navigate disability, the weight of systemic bias is compounded, making advocacy both more urgent and more sacred. Our role is to ease that burden: to hold space, affirm their brilliance, and disrupt practices that silence or exclude them.

Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
The quality I believe has been most important to my success is courage. Families invite me into some of their most sensitive and vulnerable moments which are times when they are finding the strength to challenge systems that do not align with what they know their child deserves. That trust is something I never take lightly. Courage, for me, is about speaking with authenticity and naming hard truths in rooms where they may not want to be heard, and standing alongside families even when outcomes feel uncertain. This quality has served my ancestors as they navigated systems designed to silence them, and I see my own courage as a continuation of their resilience and vision.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sankofaedconsulting.com
• Instagram: @sankofaedconsulting
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SankofaEdconsulting