Samantha Cooper
Cultural Engagement Advisor
As the Cultural Engagement Advisor for The Michigan Climate Action Network, Sam helps infuse MiCAN’s communications and events, like statewide block parties and the annual Climate Summit, with creativity. Sam also organizes with The Great Lakes Water Protector Network and Great Lakes Creatives.
Sam’s organizing path began with mobilizing administrators, students, and student government leaders to pass an annual Student Sustainability Fee in 2010 at Western Michigan University (WMU). This fee supports green student jobs & research, as well as the Sustainability Office. Sam has a B.A. from the Lee Honors College at WMU with a Student Planned Social Ecology Major.
Sam works as a musician, with her voice and violin appearing on over seventy-five albums. She also co-founded Square Dance Kalamazoo, Hearth & Hymn, and Solidarity Songs, a community choir sharing songs of grief and joy in solidarity with liberation movements. Since 2019, she has led expressive arts programs with incarcerated youth through several organizations, including Youth Arts Alliance, The Gift of Music, and Earthwork Music.
In 2020, Sam joined the effort to shut down Enbridge’s Line 3 and Line 5 pipelines. In 2021, Sam co-organized a two-year Firelight Treaty Case Campaign as a co-defendant, resulting in the dismissal of charges. She also released a video single about the crucial link between the rights of manoomin (wild rice) and the Water Is Life movement called Let The Wave (feat. Shara Nova, Jaike Spotted Wolf, Holly T. Bird(ba), Seth Bernard & Frank Bibeau).
Sam is passionate about social movement strategy, care work, and mediation. She loves co-designing Care Teams that encourage safer, more inclusive, and less disposable spaces for people to practice being and staying in community. Since 2022, Sam has co-coordinated the annual Water Weekend camp, held in conjunction with the Water Is Life Festival, the Pipe Out Paddle Up, and the Mackinac Bridge Walk, which take place during Labor Day Weekend.