On Sept. 30, I retired from my position as AFSC’s California Healing Justice Program director after 30 years on staff. I was originally hired in 1990 to research the history of the penitentiary and Quaker involvement in its creation, since the year marked the 200th anniversary of this “experiment.” The result was the book “America’s First Penitentiary: A Two Hundred Year Old Failure.”

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, AFSC launched the Farm to Food Bank Project in New Mexico to connect small-scale farmers with food banks struggling to meet rising needs during the pandemic.