Daamin X Durden

Daamin X Durden, Served as Executive Director of the Newark Community Street Team since 2020- March 2024. Bro Daamin (as he is affectionately called, is a Newark native committed to ending the cycle of violence and trauma in that city. He is part of the team that help reduce Newark’s homicide rate to its lowest in 60 years. Bro Daamin also is a key member of The Community-Based Public Safety Collective, a nonprofit taking NCST’s trauma-informed, community-based violence prevention methods to 16 communities around the country.

In 2014, Bro Daamin joined NCST as an Outreach Worker who counseled and mentored young men in Newark most at risk of turning to violence. A natural organizer and leader, he quickly rose through the organization, becoming Team Leader, Supervisor of Operations, Director of Field Operations, Chief of Operations, and now Executive Director. Bro Daamin has built a solid infrastructure of policies, procedures, and measuring impact that ensures everyone at NCST works together toward the same goals and delivers excellence to the Newark community.

Bro Daamin’s dedication to reducing violence in Newark and communities like it stems from his own background. Raised by a single mother, he first showed leadership and organization skills on the streets of Newark. His cousins remember him establishing the rules for every game before they started playing. As a young man, Bro Daamin followed a path that ended in a life sentence for armed robbery. While incarcerated at Rahway State Prison, however, Bro Daamin was transformed , studying the course Self-Improvement: the Basis for Community Development and other resources. He also became a certified paralegal and Chapter President of the NAACP at Rahway.

Bro Daamin shared his self-improvement journey with others, eventually providing legal advice to other inmates, and serving as a mediator and negotiator. In fact, prison management hired him to facilitate life skills courses. Bro Daamin became a leader and inspiration for both inmates and corrections officers. His work on his own case, his leadership example, and support letters from prison administrators and organizations led to early release after 22 years.  He keeps in touch with inmates at Rahway, providing guidance to those who get out and jobs at NCST to some. Bro Daamin believes that self-worth and feeling effective motivates people to do more and do better.  He teaches this philosophy to his 4 children who range in age from 32 to 5 years old.

A lifelong learner, Bro Daamin has more than 30 certifications. He is a trained Amer-I-Can Life Skills facilitator and a Professional Community Intervention Training Institute (PCITI) trainer in intervention and mediation techniques, offering training to intervention teams nationally. Bro Daamin is also trained in grief counseling, trauma informed practices, CPR, and 24/7 Dad Fatherhood Curriculum. He attended Essex Community College where he studied social services and nonprofit management.

Bro Daamin has been interviewed multiple times about his work at NCST and his background that informs his dedication to its mission, including on Nightline, by George Stephanopoulos on This Week, and numerous local television and newspaper outlets.