As the Art & Music Advisor for The Michigan Climate Action Network, Sam helps infuse MiCAN’s statewide block parties and their Climate Summit with creativity. Sam also organizes with The Great Lakes Water Protector Network and Great Lakes Creatives. 

Sam’s organizer 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, and a 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’s led expressive arts programs with incarcerated youth via several orgs 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 charges being dismissed. 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 an annual Water Weekend camp during the Water Is Life Festival, the Pipe Out Paddle Up, and the Mackinac Bridge Walk that happens during Labor Day Weekend.