About
Anami Dass is a harm reductionist and human rights advocate in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Anami was born near Fort Worth, TX to two teachers in 1996 as the youngest of 3. She graduated high school in 2015 and moved to Albuquerque to attend UNM. After school became financially out of reach in 2017, she experienced homelessness for the first time. She returned to housing after finding work as a cook. She briefly lived in San Francisco during the COVID-19 pandemic, but returned to New Mexico following her divorce in 2020. When she returned, she slept on friends' couches and worked as a delivery driver, eventually being promoted to the kitchen manager and regaining housing. After regaining housing, she finished her certification as a meditation teacher and began teaching around the city, eventually leading classes at the Jewish Community Center. Around this time, she came out as a transgender woman and changed her name.
Anami Dass is a harm reductionist in Albuquerque, NM. She was part of the founding team for the New Mexico chapter of DanceSafe (2018-2022), a chapter of the national 501(c)3 non-profit organization that provides harm reduction services (like drug checking, safer use education, and community safety education) to the nightlight, rave, and festival communities. In 2022, she joined the Board for the New Mexico Harm Reduction Collaborative (NMHRC), an organization that serves the international district of Albuquerque as a syringe service, overdose prevention resource distribution center, and safer use education hub. That same year, she left DanceSafe to focus on HRShare, a free-to-use online library of safer use information that only publishes information based on data and backed by lived experience.
Human Rights
In 2023, she completed her internship with the Transgender Law Center and worked as a case manager for unhoused youth in Albuquerque, and was appointed to the Albuquerque Human Rights Board, where she advocated for the prohibitions on discrimination based on gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and pregnancy in the city's Human Rights Ordinance, which were signed into law in May the following year.
After being elected to serve as Chair of the Board, Anami introduced two resolutions; the first related to the rights of people experiencing homelessness, and another urging the City of Albuquerque to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Both were approved by the Board in February of 2024. The first of which resulted in the Board's Public Hearing on Anti-Homeless Sentiment & Discrimination Based on Housing Status, where people experiencing homelessness and local advocates were able to speak directly to the city about the harsh realities of homelessness in Albuquerque.