Nechama Sammet Moring (she/her), Owner, has lifelong passions for health equity and social justice; some of her first complete sentences as a toddler were “nothing about us without us”, “serve the people” and “bring Assata home”. She has always loved to write. Nechama has been involved in reproductive, racial and disability justice movements since she was a teenager, and is a skilled community organizer and facilitator.
Nechama began her career as a midwife and worked closely with historically marginalized and underserved communities. Her clinical experience translates to a deep understanding of health care and social service systems and the real life drivers of disparities. She also developed a stomach of steel, and the ability to work with just about anyone, on very little sleep. However, after seeing client after client struggle with the health impacts of the same social issues, Nechama realized she needed to shift her focus from individuals to systems. She decided to become a researcher in order to better understand and address the social determinants of health and well-being, and to help bring community voices to the policy-making table. For her, research is about connecting individual experiences to larger patterns, and then leveraging community knowledge to remedy inequity in these patterns.
Nechama earned a master’s degree in medical anthropology, with extensive course work and real life practice in conducting community-engaged research. While in school, Nechama served as a research coordinator at a safety net hospital, with progressive responsibility for designing, conducting and disseminating research with several hard-to-reach communities. In this role, Nechama also mentored students, residents and clinical and junior faculty in identifying research questions, preparing proposals, grant writing, ethical conduct of research and obtaining IRB approval, recruitment, data collection and analysis, stakeholder engagement and dissemination. She has also been a research associate at an innovative disability policy research institute, where she continued to hone her grant writing, dissemination and research skills. Nechama has worked extensively with participatory action research and community-engaged methodologies, leading to her expertise in stakeholder engagement and collaborative research processes. She excels at knowledge translation, community engagement and innovative dissemination strategies.
Nechama is currently a doctoral student in health policy research, and she teaches graduate level research methods courses. In her spare time, Nechama can usually be found reading or eating ice cream with her pit bull, Samira. Sam is the best.
Laura Borschel, Grant Writer has been working in the non profit sector for over five years in youth and human services focusing on program management. Laura recently made the transition to grant writing and development for non-profits, garnering over 75 hours of classroom experience and 3 different certifications in grant writing. Currently they are working on several different grant and fundraising projects for Rebel Girl Research Communications, including state and federal grants, as well as assisting us with implementing fundraising strategy plans for non-profits in and around Boston. Laura is passionate about social justice and spends the majority of their free time organizing around a variety of anti capitalist/imperialistic liberation movements.
