An adventurer, an artist, a devoted mother and grandmother, and a force for social justice in her community and our world, Naomi Harris, 72, peacefully passed on from this world to the next on Friday, February 11, 2022, surrounded by loved ones in her beautiful home in Nederland after suffering from merciless liver cancer.
Born in 1950, Naomi was the 4th child and only daughter of Esther Stern (Harris) Schimmel and William “Bill” Harris in Westchester County, New York. She grew up in a home in the unique Usonia neighborhood of historically significant houses designed by legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and some of his disciples.
Naomi also developed a deep love of pottery, mosaics and other visual arts, and her eyes guided her hands to make many beautiful works, which filled her home over the decades of her adult life. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the State University of New York in New Paltz, and a Master’s in communications from Fairfield University.
She was a doting mother to daughters Sasha, born in 1975 and Leah, born in 1991. Both have gone on to have extremely meaningful careers in fields melding the arts, human rights and socio-economic justice. Naomi was also blessed with a fun-loving and curious grandson Z, who adored his “Bubbe.”
In Colorado, Naomi was part of a diverse core organizing team that launched and ran the Reading to End Racism program within the Boulder Valley School District.
For 10 years, Naomi also worked on restorative justice programs through the Boulder County Probation Department building juvenile and adult offenders’ sense of value while helping them accept responsibility for their actions, understand the pain they caused their victims, apologize and make amends in a way that gave the offenders dignity.
Not to be totally preoccupied with politics in her life, Naomi was a relentless explorer by nature, drawn to backpacking, camping and white water expedition, canoeing all over Colorado and the Rocky Mountain ranges from the Smokies to the Canadian border. Camping and hiking trips would take her to nearby Wyoming, Arizona, Idaho and other breathtaking locations in the mountain west.
Drawing from her family history and as life got more finite, Naomi made traveling a priority, seeking adventure and soaking up cultural exposure and natural beauty in faraway places such as Central Europe, Turkey, Greece, Costa Rica, France, Jordan, Mexico; making unlikely friends in rain-soaked days in northern Portugal or a hidden flamenco dive in Segovia.
One of Naomi’s great loves in her life was singing, and she was an active member of several choruses, including the Resonance Women’s Chorus – a tight group of talented, socially conscious community members. In the last weeks of her life, the women of Resonance traveled to Nederland to perform a concert for her on her back porch.
Naomi is survived by her daughters Sasha Harris-Cronin and Leah Hammond of San Francisco, California, stepson Noah Hammond of Oakland California, grandson Z Harris Taylor and his parent Nyx Taylor; older brothers Ethan, Michael and Joel Harris, sisters in-law Ruth Weiner Harris, Diane Harris and Arlene Iverson, brother in-law Bob Hammond, nephews Av, Baruch, Menachem, Aaron, Simon and Daniel Harris, and niece Yehudis Barmatz, and many loving cousins.
Naomi is also survived by her two former husbands Tom Hammond of Nederland, Colorado and John Cronin of Garrison, New York, and her two extremely cute and curious cats, Wona and Toku, both given powerful names from the Ute indigenous nation whose ancestral homeland was in the area of Boulder and the mountains to the west before the arrival of white settlers.
Naomi will be forever loved and missed by her family and friends, and will always be remembered as a woman who was determined with every fiber of her being to force the world to be a better place, and do it with a lot of heart and a sense of humor. And she succeeded.
May her memory always be a blessing.
Naomi’s funeral will be held at 12:15 p.m. on Sunday, February 13 at Congregation Bonai Shalom Synagogue. A short graveside service at Mountain View Cemetery will follow. Please wear a mask if you are planning to attend in person at Bonai Shalom. A simultaneous livestream of the synagogue service will also be available here: https:// venue.streamspot.com/4f58b8e0.
Naomi has asked that friends donate to the Water Protector Legal Collective in her memory. Donation options can be found here: https:// www.waterprotectorlegal.org/ donate.
