Today we spotlight Leora Sammett, alumnus of the Avodah Service Corps in New York (2022-2023).
Leora sits down with Avodah to discuss what brought her to the Service Corps, her work supporting young immigrant women at The Brave House, and why radical hospitality is more important than ever.
How did you come to the Avodah Service Corps?
I knew a family friend who did Avodah in D.C. the year prior and the Service Corps, and had a really positive experience with the communal living aspect of the organization. I was interested in the communal living aspect as well, which really drew me in.
I also went through most of college not even really identifying as Jewish. I’d never had any consistent practices of Shabbat dinners, celebrating Jewish holidays together. I was really new to that. So that was a cool part of the experience was being able to, almost every Friday, have some sort of practice that I could depend on, something I could come home and participate in if I wanted to. It was great being able to cultivate a community altogether.
I was curious because I also hadn’t really been spending a lot of time in spaces that were for Jewish people of color. I think that was kind of what drew me in the most coming out of college. So I was excited to try the Jews of Color bayit program. I wanted to see if I could sort of highlight the Jewish part of my identity for a year in combination with my work at my placement, which I was really excited about, doing immigration work that I’d been doing a lot in college. So it felt like it was just like kind of the perfect setup to continue my exploration of my identity.
Why was the communal living aspect important to you?
I thought it was a unique way to find community in a new city. I was looking into a couple other organizations with similar structures, AmeriCorps being one of them, and I thought the living style of Avodah seemed more intentional.
Communal living taught me a lot about myself and what I need out of a living environment, as well as how to be able to be empathetic towards the many people that you’re living with. I’ve definitely taken that experience with me into other living situations.
You served at The Brave House. Tell me about what it was like serving as a Corps Member and then your transition to working there afterwards.
The Brave House is an organization for women and by women. We were a small team of only five full time staff driving this organization forward. We were all women ourselves and that was essential for the community that we’re supporting, which is comprised of women and gender non conforming people.
It’s also the only organization in New York City that is really doing what we’re doing supporting young immigrant women. Everything that we were doing was very trauma informed. Central to our work was the concept of “radical hospitality” which just feels so beyond important in this time right now. It’s the belief that we have to celebrate and welcome and hear everybody – vulnerable and marginalized people deserve to have that much sort of as a baseline.
Anytime a new Brave House member would come into the organization and the community, we would have an outpouring of love and respect for that individual, regardless if they had recently arrived or had been in the country for years.
The intention behind the Brave House is so incredible, it’s unlike anything that I’d seen before. I felt so lucky that I was able to work at an organization that was doing immigration work and became just a really beautiful continuation of the work that I’d been doing for years prior in immigration advocacy.
In college, I was involved in immigration advocacy both on and off campus. Both in the community of the city of Lancaster, where my school was located in Pennsylvania, and on campus I worked with organizations that supported undocumented people. I loved supporting the undocumented students on my college’s campus especially. We would help to document their stories and create space for the immigrant community.
So it felt like coming to the Brave House I was able to kind of combine all of those experiences to provide really holistic community support for a specifically vulnerable population of immigrant women. It was exactly the thing that I wanted to be doing.
What was your role at The Brave House?
The Brave House is an incredible organization and it felt really great that I had that full year to be at the organization through Avodah.
I worked as the Youth Advocate when I was an Avodah Corps Member. I was primarily doing case management then. I would support Brave House women with getting health insurance, their driver’s licenses, and school and career support. I was providing across the board support. It was definitely an intimate way of getting to know the women and working closely with them and I really appreciated that.
At the end of the year, I had conversations with my supervisor about transitioning to a full time role. We asked “is this a good fit? Can I stay?”. And luckily they said yes.
Transitioning from my year of service to being a salaried employee was really seamless. If it’s a great fit at your placement, it should feel like a pretty natural, seamless transition into that work post Avodah.
My new role was as the Leadership Advocate, where I worked on the leadership programming side of the organization. I helped develop an internal youth leadership board for the women and designed the programming to basically create pathways for Brave House women 16 to 24 years old, to not only be leaders in their own communities, but ideally, one day become leaders of the organization itself.
It was less one-on-one case management, and more working on organization-wide holistic approaches. I got to work more closely with the founder of the organization to help train Brave House women to excel in their lives.
These Brave House women brought a lot to the table. So it wasn’t very hard to do my job.
What was the impact of your work at The Brave House?
I got to support so many amazing women. I was actually able to start this project in the last eight months of my time at the organization, involving creating a storytelling archive where I was able to lead five transcribed interviews with five different women who I developed trusted relationships with over the two and a half years of me working there. I compiled those transcriptions of them sharing stories and memories across their lives and helped design an archive that now lives on the Brave House website.
It felt like one of the most comprehensive ways that I could kind of capture their authenticity and our close relationships, and kind of leave them with like a parting memorial, or tribute. It was a cool way to, to have an impact leaving the organization, as well as just knowing that they are all in like really great hands and the organization itself is like a really blossoming team.
I am so grateful that I got to be able to be a part of it for as long as I did.
As someone who has supported immigrants, how are you navigating this moment where the federal government is targeting immigrant communities?
I’m so grateful that I have all the tools that I’ve accumulated over the years, especially working at the Brave House. I have resources in my back pocket to support, even people that I’m meeting on the street in NYC. I feel very lucky that I have those resources to be able to point folks to food support or financial support.
I’ve been trying to more readily return to this concept of radical hospitality, even if it requires more energy on our parts to give to those people who, right now, are going to be met with anything but radical hospitality.
What are you taking with you from your experience at Avodah?
Avodah helped me to form a pretty specific understanding of community for myself. There can be so many isolating moments in our lives. I’ve really tried to take with me this understanding of what it feels like to want to connect with the people around me, to like wanting to be able to show up for my friends and have joyful moments together.
And I think there were many moments in Avodah that did feel joyful and impactful. And I like to think that I can take those feelings with me and be able to tap back into those when I need to.
The main thing I’m taking away is the understanding of what it means to connect with the people in your life, especially in a city this big. I’m very appreciative of that.
