Philadelphia Yearly Meeting

of the Religious Society of Friends

Peace and Social Action

Saving Our Stories – Training in Oral History

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This online training will focus on the basics of doing oral history interviews including planning, releases, concerns, Zoom and other audio-visual tips, and publication/posting.

This program is offered free, as a service from SouthJerseyQuakers.  We welcome multiple participants from Meetings and other groups.

We encourage Friends to focus on how a Meeting or individual Friends made South Jersey (and other communities) a better place to live.  Additional topics, such as how our faith and practices have guided – and enhanced – Friends’ lives are important to record as well.

Melissa Ziobro, Specialist Professor of Public History, Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University, and President of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region, will lead this training.  She is also the editor for New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, a joint venture of the NJ Historical Commission, Rutgers University Libraries, and Monmouth University.

Saving our Stories – Training in Oral History

Written on:

This online training will focus on the basics of doing oral history interviews including planning, releases, concerns, Zoom and other audio-visual tips, and publication/posting.  This program is offered free, as a service from SouthJerseyQuakers.  We welcome multiple participants from Friends’ meetings and other groups.

We encourage Friends to focus on how a Meeting or individual Friends made South Jersey (and other communities) a better place to live.  Additional topics, such as how our faith and practices have guided – and enhanced – Friends’ lives are important to record as well.

Our resource person for this training is Melissa Ziobro, Specialist Professor of Public History, Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University, and President of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region, will lead this training.  She is also the editor for New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, a joint venture of the NJ Historical Commission, Rutgers University Libraries, and Monmouth University.

Please pre-register.  Zoom details will be emailed on the day prior to the program.

 

Let’s Talk About Faith-based Reparations

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A world that is accountable for past harms including slavery, colonialism, genocide, and other material and moral abuses will be a world better for everyone. The Grassroots Reparations Campaign sponsors a course to examine the history, spiritual, conceptual (ethical and moral) and practical dimensions of reparations as a global movement. Centered on the approach to reparation from the United Nations, the twelve-hour course explores the perspectives that justify and help many ground the case for faith-based reparations. The spiritual journey to uproot white supremacy externally and internally co-exists with working toward full reparations and abolition-democracy. Barb Kreider will offer some insights from this course. Click here or call 646-558-8656 and enter meeting ID 873 3565 8140 to be part of the conversation.

Cropwell Open House

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cropwellquakermeeting We’re so excited to announce our Open House on September 18th, from 10am-2pm! We will be hosting the event outside with plenty of activities involving spirituality, family, and history. Visitors will also be welcome to visit in the worship space in the Meetinghouse (with windows and doors open, and other COVID safety measures).  Can’t wait to see you then!

21st Annual Peace Fair

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Volunteers, Non-Profits, Crafts Vendors Needed! The 21st Annual Peace Fair of Bucks Quarterly Meeting will take place on Saturday, September 18, 2021, at Buckingham Friends Meetinghouse in Lahaska, just south of Peddlers Village. Up to 100 booths of local crafts, artwork, food, games, animals and Bucks area non-profits whose focus is peace, community service, healthy living and the environment. Browse the book sale and listen to entertainers like the Tookany Creek bluegrass band, River Drivers and kids’ songster Ecoman. Hear Bucks and Montgomery County poet laureates at the Poetry Reading or tour the Buckingham Quaker Meetinghouse, a National Landmark. The fair runs from 10:30am until 4:00pm and is handicap accessible. The suggested donation is $2 and parking is free. Local residents from toddlers to seniors will enjoy a delightful, engaging and uplifting day among the giant oaks and maples at the Peace Fair.

PYM Grants for Family Planning

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PYM’s Natalie Clifford Barney Fund provides grants to organizations providing family planning, specifically planned parenthood and birth control. Over the course of winter 2021, members of the Quaker Buildings & Programs granting group met several times to discern an impactful use of the funds today.

[Read more…] about PYM Grants for Family Planning

COVID: A Day of Remembrance

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On Friday, August 20, between 8-8:20 PM, Friends will gather outside their meetinghouses –  or at their homes –  for a silent, candlelight vigil during which we will remember the many ways we as individuals and a community were impacted by the COVID pandemic.  This includes sorrows and joys, hardships and sharing, isolation and fellowship.   We will be linked during the 20 minutes by Zoom.  Meetings may wish to add a dinner or memorial-style meeting in advance of 8 PM, and invite others (such as the local Council of Churches) to join them.  NOTE:   Monthly Meetings and individuals participating from home are encouraged to pre-register in order to receive the Zoom link.

Let’s Talk About ‘How Can We Win?’

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Author and activist Kimberly Jones went viral with a YouTube interview in which she asks, “How can we win?” Moorestown Friends Meeting’s Anti-Racism Committee recommends the interview highly; we’ll host a discussion of Jones’s perspective on race, protest, violence and economics for this Let’s Talk session on Thursday 22 July. Watch Jones’s seven-minute interview on YouTube – and maybe her 12-minute appearance on The Daily Show – then join us to discuss Jones’s ideas and our own perspectives; click here or phone 646-558-8656 and use meeting ID 815 8781 6369.

Broadcast of Must See Documentary Dawnland 11-5-18 @ 10 PBS

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Greetings from the Indian Committee

We want you to be aware of on MONDAY NOVEMBER 5th 10PM PBS will broadcast DAWNLAND

Our friends Wayne Newell and Denise Altvater (AFSC WABANAKI) are among those featured. See link below.
Thanks to Elizabeth Koopman

About the Film

They were forced to assimilate into white society: children ripped away from their families, depriving them of their culture and erasing their identities. Can reconciliation help heal the scars from childhoods lost? Dawnland is the untold story of Indigenous child removal in the US through the nation’s first-ever government-endorsed truth and reconciliation commission, which investigated the devastating impact of Maine’s child welfare practices on the Wabanaki people.

https://upstanderproject.org/dawnland/

PS Learn the Lenape Language online! http://talk-lenape.org/getting-started

 

Green Street Meeting provides school supplies to children at EMIR Healing Center

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Green Street Meeting’s EMIR Ministry Support Group says a heartfelt “Thank you!” to everyone at Green Street, the meetings in Philadelphia Quarter, and beyond who supported our school supplies drive in summer 2018.

The drive benefited 103 children whose families had lost a loved one to homicide, and who received services and support from the EMIR Healing Center. The center was founded by our member Victoria Greene, and named in memory of her son Emir, who was murdered. The name also makes the statement “Every Murder Is Real.” No matter who the victim was, or how much or little attention the crime received, that person’s loved ones are mourning their loss for years afterwards.

Still going strong in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood, after 19 years, the EMIR Healing Center continues to help families survive and eventually heal from the pain of losing a loved one to homicide.

Friends from Green Street Meeting formed the EMIR Ministry Support Group in early 2018. We use the Quaker Social Change Ministry model, developed by American Friends Service Committee (especially Green Street member Lucy Duncan). In this model, a group of Quakers partner with a local organization led by people most impacted by a particular issue. The Quaker group follows their lead in deciding what to work on. The model also makes time for spiritual sharing, connection, and reflection, leading to deeper relationship, followership, and grounding of action.

Victoria asked our group at Green Street to organize a drive to provide backpacks with school supplies to the children EMIR serves. When a parent is mourning a murdered family member, whether it be a brother, sister, parent, or child, it can be very hard for them to keep things together for the rest of the family. They may be depressed and overwhelmed, and not as able to track things like school start dates and supply lists. They may lose income or even their job.

Our ministry support group got organized in the spring, asked the Meeting to take us under their care, and then spent the summer campaigning and publicizing the drive. An online buying service was set up so supporters could buy things and have them shipped directly to EMIR. (See this PYM news story from May 2018.)

With a couple of weeks to go before our deadline, we had 51 backpacks, toward our goal of 85. And then we found out there were 103 kids served by EMIR! With God’s abundance, people came through. We had enough to serve every child. We raised about $1,750 in donations, which enabled us to fill gaps in what was bought online or contributed in person.

The week before school started, we gave away 103 backpacks with school supplies in them at the EMIR office. The little children in particular were overjoyed. There were even a few backpacks left over, in case other children have a need.

Victoria said it was a great success and thanked our support group for doing the project and everyone who contributed supplies, funds, or time.

To everyone who purchased supplies online, dropped off supplies directly at the Meetinghouse or at the EMIR office, or made a donation, THANK YOU!

– Chris Mohr, support group convenor

Photo: Victoria Greene, member of Green Street Meeting and founder of EMIR Healing Center, with a box used to collect school supplies. Learn more about EMIR at emirphilly.org.