Note: Madeline Schaefer, Aarati Kasturirangan, and I attended a Healing and Rebuilding our Communities (HROC) workshop in Baltimore in May. This is the second of three posts about aspects of the workshop.

What is needed to build trust in community? After the HROC participants discussed healing from trauma and trust and mistrust, we set about to answer this question in small groups, and then reported back to each other.

As a whole group, we built a list of 49 qualities and practices needed to build trust in community.

In 1942, Gordon Hirabayashi (1918-2012) refused to obey the 8 p.m. curfew for Japanese-Americans established after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. After turning himself in to the FBI, Gordon was sentenced to 90 days in prison, and appealed his case all the way up to the Supreme Court, with the help of Quakers and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). 

I live with my family in a 17-acre Quaker cemetery outside of the west edge of Philadelphia. My husband, Graham, is the cemetery’s caretaker. We live in the house on the grounds built in 1860. Our 11-year-old son, Simon, has known no other home.

There are a few notable Quaker dead buried there: Henry Cadbury, Margaret Hope Bacon, and Addison Hutton, but most of those buried aren't famous—they just lived simple lives.

In the middle of May 2013, Kofi (whose name was changed for this story) was detained and deported to his home country in Africa. The family he left behind—including a girlfriend and two children—are struggling with his absence, unsure of their future or his fate. Listen to the story of this family, and hear how the AFSC community in Newark is speaking out against his deportation and others that tear apart families.