Nechama F. Sammet Moring
Mother of revolutions
“The system doesn’t care for us, but we care for each other, and that’s powerful. The system is never gonna save us, but solidarity might. Mentoring is radical because it’s solidarity. It’s radical relationships of taking our own knowledge back, caring for each other, keeping each other alive, saving ourselves and making sure we survive, that our resistance survives and grows.”
We are proud to induct Nechama F. Sammet Moring into the Susan Daniels Disability Mentoring Hall of Fame.
Nechama is a queer disabled anarchist, educator, writer, survivor, direct action activist, midwife, abortionist, organizer and riot mom / mother of revolutions. They have supported queer, trans, disabled, racialized and structurally marginalized youth and taught about policy, oppression and resistance at several colleges and universities as an often-fired adjunct professor. While structurally marginalized students often describe Nechama’s classes as genuinely safe, truly welcoming and life-altering, she does not fuck around with allowing racism or any other forms of oppression a platform, and she frequently names casual but ever-present institutional racism and models the importance of fighting back with everything we have. This leads to the shedding of quite a few white tears, non-renewals of her teaching contracts and out and out retaliation. Nechama is adept at creating nurturing, disability affirming environments and integrating universal design – this also pisses off academia.
Nechama always wanted to be an investigative reporter, but patriarchy, survivorship and their mother made them feel that their value was solely in nurturing others and they obtained a qualitative research degree because this was as close to that dream as they thought they could get. They developed expertise in participatory action and community informed research with people with cognitive disabilities, including leading several research and organizing projects related to disability and reproductive justice. They also hold the proud distinction of being fired from every academic job they’ve ever held for unionizing, speaking up, and, in one notable case at a disability policy institute, defending research participants and asking for disability accommodations (which their boss termed a bad attitude, to which Nechama says bring it). Nechama has built a business as a communications and knowledge translation specialist and grant writer, redistributing corporate money and stolen resources to activists and their communities. She is finally now pursuing her dream of journalism and writing.
Nechama has extensive experience in direct action and reproductive justice activism and community care, and offers invaluable community education and infrastructure development around caring for one another. She believes that caring for oppressed bodies in community is inherently radical work, and mentors others in the practical aspects of this work. After a police brutality-caused brain injury left her with seizures that complicate her frontline work, Nechama is even more focused on mentoring and ensuring that younger activists have the skills they need to stay safe, and that our communities are strong enough to continue the radical care work that has always kept us alive and fighting. Nechama is the mother of a stillborn child, Amado.
They are committed to queer family building in all its forms, and to the reproductive justice dream of honoring every person’s choices to build family on their own terms, to have children, not have children and nurture the children and relationships we do have in the ways that are meaningful to us, to love one another well in community, free from state violence, including the violence of poverty. Nechama’s writing – including their book in progress – are also a restorative, healing balm for so many queer and disabled survivors of trauma.
Nechama’s dog, Samira, a pit bull from the shelter who has lived with Nechama for the last decade, is a soulmate and best friend who taught herself how to seizure alert for them. Nechama and Samira are a unit, a human/pit bull cryptid practicing interdependence and disability justice inspired love.