Samantha LeeAnn Photography
Plenary Speaker
susan abulhawa / T. Sauppe
AFSC is delighted to host susan abulhawa [lowercase is intentional] as our keynote speaker for the 2025 Corporation Program. susan abulhawa is a novelist, poet, essayist, scientist, mother, and activist. She was born to refugees of the Six-Day War of 1967, when her family's land was seized and Israel captured what remained of Palestine. Her debut novel, Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury, 2010), translated into 30 languages, has sold over a million copies worldwide and is considered a classic in Palestinian literature. Her other novels include The Blue Between Sky and Water (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Against the Loveless World (Simon & Schuster, 2020), an Aspen Words Literary Prize and Atheneum Prize finalist and winner of the Arab American Book Award and the Palestine Book Award, along with the poetry collection, My Voice Sought the Wind (Just World Books, 2013). abulhawa is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, a children’s organization dedicated to uplifting Palestinian children.
*This is a hybrid event
Workshops
From the Inside Out: AFSC Strategies Towards Abolition
The New York/New Jersey Healing Justice program works with individuals, communities, and systems to heal from the harms of the carceral state and shift from paradigms of punishment and retribution to paradigms of healing and restoration. Program staff support communities through an abolitionist approach in their empowerment with the Prison Watch Program and the youth-centered Liberation Academy and Liberation Summer Camp. In these efforts, AFSC staff listen, accompany, and are led by those most directly impacted while also engaging allies from various communities, including Quakers. The program strives to bridge gaps between harmed communities and policy makers by direct engagement with departments of corrections and legislative bodies across New York and New Jersey including serving on boards, community-based oversight in partnership with people with lived experience, and policy advocacy.
Join Healing Justice Program Director King Downing, Prison Watch Coordinator Bonnie Kerness, and Youth Empowerment and Engagement Coordinator Akira Rose as they share their work and opportunities to engage with their program.
*This is a hybrid workshop
Facilitators: King Downing, Bonnie Kerness, and Akira Rose
Ending Life and Long Sentences in Michigan
This workshop will discuss the work of the Michigan Criminal Justice program over the past few years to end the state's over-reliance on excessive punishment. The Michigan office has focused on two specific mechanisms for ending this perpetual punishment: 1) encouraging the governor to use her clemency powers to commute the sentences of women sentenced to die in prison (or serve lengthy sentences that serve no legit penological purpose), and 2) encouraging the legislature to pass "second look" legislation that would allow judges to reconsider and reduce the prison time of people with excessively long sentences.
The Michigan Criminal Justice program has also been steadily developing new approaches to narrative change work to get at the root of this over-reliance on punishment. In this workshop, staff from our Michigan program will discuss how all of their work fits together and provide opportunities for participants to get involved with commutation work.
Facilitators: Peter Martel and Adalia Kirby
Sowing the Seeds of Justice
AFSC has worked on food justice issues for over 100 years in many ways in the US and around the world. This workshop will look back at some of this history and share information about current work with a special focus on how the Peace by Piece New Orleans program uses farming and urban gardening to build food sovereignty and security and support community organizing. Participants will also learn about imminent policy threats to food security at the federal and state levels and how to oppose them.
*This is a hybrid workshop
Facilitators: Rick Wilson, Dee Dee Green, and Blair Minnard
Me+We = Stalwart Solidarity: Prudence Crandall, Sarah Harris, & audacious allyship-- then and now
This workshop will explore the transformative power of audacious allyship, using the historic relationship between Quaker activist Prudence Crandall and her student, Sarah Harris, as a lens to examine the role of individual courage in collective justice movements. Drawing connections to St. Louis Peacebuilding and fellow AFSC Healing Justice programs, the workshop will highlight how youth activism and conscientious coalitions continue to challenge systemic injustices today.
Core Queries:
Can you name an aspect of the spark of divine in you? Do you embody it? How so?
How about in others: Can we celebrate their spark when we fundamentally disagree?
What happens when allyship is not convenient?
When the stakes are high, what are we willing to risk, disrupt, and reimagine?
Is there at least one issue or matter we can identify that might stretch us?
Facilitator: Barbara Gunn Lartey
Peace Games Simulation
You may have heard of War Games, but have you heard of Peace Games? Join us for this multi-party peace process simulation set in Northeast Asia! Through this role-play-style workshop, participants will learn about regional issues in Northeast Asia, and the unique challenges and opportunities of negotiating and peacemaking in the twenty-first century.
Note: This is a two-part workshop. Attendees must sign up for both sections to participate.
Facilitators: Kavita Desai, Marianne Elias, and Austin Headrick
Eastern State Penitentiary
Jeremy Powlus for Google+ / Eastern State
Friday, April 25 at 6 p.m. ET
*This portion of the AFSC Corporation Meeting is not open to the public, and it is in-person only.
AFSC’s Corporation members will be taking a private tour of Eastern State Penitentiary, and they will experience programmed Quaker worship on-site with attention to the experiences of incarcerated people and AFSC’s call for criminal justice reform in the United States. Eastern State Penitentiary was once the world's first true "penitentiary," a prison designed by Quakers to inspire penitence, or true regret, in the hearts of prisoners through experimental approaches to prisoner rehabilitation, such as solitary confinement. Today, Eastern State Penitentiary works to advance public understanding of the criminal justice system, and its impact on the lives of those affected by it, to promote a criminal justice system that treats everyone with fairness and dignity.
This is a private event. It is not endorsed by or affiliated with Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site.
Pendle Hill / Francisco Burgos
Francisco Burgos is Executive Director of Pendle Hill, a Quaker study and retreat center in Pennsylvania, where he previously served as Director of Education. Prior to joining Pendle Hill, he held leadership positions at the Center for Community Initiatives at the Monteverde Institute and at Monteverde Friends School in Costa Rica. He also served with the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C. and the American Friends Service Committee in Baltimore, Maryland. Francisco was a De La Salle Christian Brother for almost ten years, serving in Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, and has been a Friend since 2004. He is a member of Harrisburg Friends Meeting and an attender of meetings including Adelphi Friends Meeting in Maryland and Providence Monthly Meeting in Media. Burgos has a B.S. in Clinical Psychology from the National University Pedro Henriquez Ureña in the Dominican Republic, an M.A. in Sustainable Development from The School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, and a Doctor of Education from Universidad de La Salle in Costa Rica.
Courage to Resist: Commemorating 50 Years Since Vietnam
Saturday, April 26 at 5:30 p.m. ET / 2:30 p.m. PT
On Saturday, April 26, we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War with an evening of stories, connection, resistance, and looking forward. With opportunities to engage both in person and online, we will highlight AFSC's steadfast work to combat the war and the stories of those who carried out the work on the ground.
Please join us at 5:30 p.m. ET for a reception. There will be a conversation with AFSC's Archivist Don Davis and the opportunity to catch up with old and new friends.
The hybrid program will begin at 7 p.m. ET featuring a conversation with Claudia Krich. Claudia and her husband, Keith Brinton, were co-directors of the AFSC Quang Ngai program from March 1973 until July 1975. In her new book "Those Who Stayed" she offers a personal firsthand account of the collapse of the South Vietnamese government and the beginning of the new Provisional Revolutionary Government. Her vivid descriptions of those days emerge primarily from her journal, which captured the uncertainty, fear, and excitement as the North Vietnamese soldiers arrived.