Meet Daniel

---

Executive Director, San Francisco, California

Daniel Mango is the Executive Director here at IMHA. He is a passionate, dedicated, and caring social worker based in San Francisco, California. Daniel has had a myriad of life experiences that have shaped him into the freedom fighter that he is today. He is a military veteran, a former teacher & educator, a therapist, and an organic intellectual. IMHA provided Daniel with the opportunity to heal more people collectively through the extensive reach of the non-profit and used this opportunity to grow his work at IMHA by facilitating healing spaces and community programming.

Besides trying to take down the system of white supremacy, Daniel loves to read, hang out with his partner, pet his cat, and play basketball. He loves to write fiction and when he was younger created a variety of social, racial, and economic justice themed screenplays based on the racialized experiences that he experienced while growing up. Daniel appreciates all kinds of music and used to be a poet, dj, and a music producer. He also believes in ending all forms of injustice globally through the creation of decolonized, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-sexist, anti-ageist, disablity-affirming, neurodiversity-affirming, Black-affirming, queer-affirming, transgender-affirming, Black woman-affirming, Indigenous-affirming, alternative epistemologies-affirming, feminist, multiracial, and intergenerational coalitions that can advance social justice through the centering of historically marginalized populations. 

Daniel’s core strengths include critical thinking & analysis, writing, and (de)construction. He values positive identity development and holds workshops and trainings to support people to create healthy and culturally-affirming identities that can resist even the most vicious racism and discrinimation. 

Daniel believes in community healing and the role of the community in (un)learning our colonial “scripts” and (re)learning Indigenous knowledge that was thought to be “lost” through the colonization process. This knowledge can help us (re)gain the humanity we lost through the epistemicide of Indigenous knowledge systems, the dehumanizing practices of Eurocentric hegemony, the age of imperialism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, Indigenous genocide, African enslavement, racial capitalism, antiblack racism, colonialism, neocolonialism, whiteness, the psychiatrization of the globe, neoliberalism, the patriarchy, and the rigid and unnatural gender roles carried over from the colonial legacy that attempted to remove all traces of the vital contributions that girls, woman, gay, queer, and trans-folks performed within pre-colonial society. 

“Before you accept any thought, idea, or feeling as truth, some of the most important questions one can ask themselves are: How do I know what I know? Where does my knowledge come from? Who does it center? Who is excluded? Asking yourself these questions nurtures a critical mindset that grounds us in our collective human experience, which promotes the belief that all cultures have something beneficial to contribute to humanity. This is done without obscuring our vision with the long-held and uncritical acceptance by all humans of the master narrative of American-European superiority that attempt to supplant important historical achievements by non-dominant cultures” - Daniel Mango 

Feel free to reach out to me at anytime, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can:

daniel@imha.ngo