Dear Friend,
I hope this message finds you well and thriving!
This is the inaugural issue of a monthly digest email of news and engagement opportunities from AFSC. As a liaison/contact, you play a vital role in helping AFSC deepen our engagement with Friends and Friends’ engagement with AFSC. Thank you! Please share this newsletter each month with your meeting/church through your list serve, your newsletter, at announcements, at the rise of meeting or through other means. We will be selecting content especially relevant to Friends and hope you might share it widely with your community.
Please also invite core contacts and meeting/church liaisons in your meeting/church or other meetings/churches to sign up to receive this email and invitations to special events curated specifically for Quakers.
- Wanting to engage with AFSC or social justice work more deeply? Join a conversation about AFSC engagement opportunities for Friends on July 20 from 8:00 to 9:30 p.m. ET. We will talk about how to keep your Quaker meeting/church informed and engaged as well as how to bring Quaker work for social justice to AFSC. Learn more and register here.
- The Quakers uprooting racism coalition (AFSC, Friends General Conference (FGC), Friends Council on Education (FCED), and Pendle Hill) launched their 10-month community of practice project this month to accelerate racial justice work among Friends. Friends in North America are encouraged to apply to become a part of a cohort of racial justice changemakers to meet, learn, and strategize together in two retreats and monthly sessions from September 2021 through June 2022.
- The 2021 AFSC annual Corporation program, Making New Worlds: Pursuing peace with justice was open to all Quakers this year and focused on different aspects of abolition. Find and explore all the recorded sessions here and perhaps use one of the recordings for your adult First Day school to delve into one of the session topics.
- Join our webinar series on Community Safety beyond Policing. For the past year we have been exploring how we can work toward a world where all people are safe, with the resources needed to thrive and the tools needed to protect each other. You can find all the archived sessions here and register for the next live session on August 12.
- Intermountain Yearly Meeting and South Central Yearly Meeting approved minutes in support of the No Way to Treat a Child campaign, a campaign to uphold the human rights of children in Palestine. Learn more about how Quakers can get involved in this work.
Hope your (mostly online) summer zoom yearly meetings have been nourishing times of community as we all look forward to being together in person next year!
Blessings,
Sofia Di Pietro
Communications Associate
P.S. You can find more ways to get involved at our Friends Engage page.