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Encouraging Monthly Meetings to Nurture Friends with Leadings to
Peace Witness by Rosa Covington Packard, New York Yearly Meeting
The vision of “Every Monthly Meeting as a Center for Peacemaking” was
taken to our New York Yearly Meeting’s Peace Concerns Committee, on
which I serve and which encourages me to report on Friends Peace Teams
Project (FPTP) matters. This vision of FPTP work is beginning to bear
specific fruit in our Yearly Meeting. Of course the vision will be,
as it always has been, defined differently by each Monthly Meeting.
I am currently joining other Friends on the Peace Committee of New
York Yearly Meeting to interview by telephone Friends in each of our
sixty Monthly Meetings to learn what is going on and who is doing what
and how we may help each other. Friends witness is already there and
flows from the wellspring and guidance of the Holy Spirit. At this time
my work as FPTP’s New York Yearly Meeting Representative and the work
of the Peace Concerns Committee appears to be the naming and holding
up of witness and skills that already exist or are emerging and the
beginning of a new focus in our Yearly Meeting on Monthly Meetings’
relationships to individual leadings.
As FPTP’s Representative, I sponsored an interest group on Released
Friends by Liz Yates and worked with other Friends on a subcommittee
of Witness Coordinating Committee to develop a bibliography for Monthly
Meetings relating to the clearness, support and oversight of individual
Friends who have leadings. Thanks to the work of John Randall, Scarsdale
Meeting, this is available on the New York Yearly Meeting’s web page.
Also very helpful was an interest group given by Marty Grundy at our
recent yearly meeting about the work of Friends General Conference’s
visitation program, and her just published Pendle Hill Pamphlet, Tall
Poppies.
Various New York Yearly Meeting Monthly Meetings have opportunities
to practice, as appropriate, clearness, support and oversight of Friends
with leadings to peace witness. Two peaceworkers who are being supported
are Shirley Way and Carolyn Keys.
Shirley Way of Morningside Meeting will go this summer with a Christian
Peacemaker Team delegation to Mexico as the first step in a spiritual
journey of witness that includes taking additional nonviolence training
and improving her Spanish. Christian Peacemaker Teams is a partner with
Friends Peace Teams Project. Shirley Way, who spent the last year at
Pendle Hill, has received initial support from New York Yearly Meeting’s
Latin American Concerns Committee, and its Peace Concerns Committee
and from The Elise Boulding Fund for Peace Team Work of Friends Peace
Teams Project. She previously went to the San Carlos Hospital in Mexico
with a team lead by Elaine Chamberlain of Buffalo Monthly Meeting under
the care of Latin American Concerns Committee, for which FPTP facilitated
a team retreat.
Carolyn Keys of Montclair Monthly Meeting has been accepted by the
African Great Lakes Initiative (AGLI) of FPTP to serve for two years
at the invitation of Burundi Yearly Meeting on a team that seeks to
develop a trauma and reconciliation center there (see African
Great Lakes Initiative’s Burundi Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Center
in this issue). Carolyn Keys has years of relevant work as a social
worker and is clerk of New York Yearly Meeting’s Black Concerns Committee
that supported John Johnson of Staten Island Meeting last summer on
AGLI’s Kamenge Reconciliation and Reconstruction Project, cosponsored
with Burundi Yearly Meeting.
As FPTP’s representative, I helped organize the week-long “Ministry
of Mediation” Institute at Powell House, New York Yearly Meeting’s Conference
Center, in August, 1999, working with Deborah Wood of Purchase Meeting
to revise the two hundred page manual from the Lombard Mennonite Peace
Center into Quaker culture and language for that event. Another week-long
“Ministry of Mediation” Institute will be held this August at Powell
House.
Deborah Wood and I also developed a weekend training agenda for Monthly
and Quarterly Meetings on “The Ministry of Mediation” that we initiated
at Purchase Meeting in March, 2000, as a Powell House on the Road program.
The facilitation team included Ann Davidson, Farmington Meeting, who
is director of Powell House, and Betsy Rothstein, Bulls Head Meeting,
who is co-clerk of the board of New York’s Alternatives to Violence
Project. This agenda, designed for team facilitation, was based on the
The Mediators’ Handbook published by Friends Conflict Resolution
Programs in Philadelphia.
Out of these experiences Friends are encouraged to help Monthly Meetings
educate themselves in the skills of mediation. Many Friends in our Yearly
Meeting have experience as Alternative to Violence Project facilitators
in prison programs and can help facilitate such educational sessions
in Monthly Meetings or in their communities. Many individuals in our
Yearly Meeting serve as mediators already. Each county in New York State
has a court referral program, started over a decade ago thanks to the
initiative of Albany Meeting Friends. In addition there are many Friends
who use their skills professionally in family counseling or divorce
law.
Friends are also working in peer mediation and other conflict resolution
programs in the schools; for example, the Stamford Area Council of Churches
and Synagogues has appointed Peggi Chute of Stamford Greenwich Meeting
director of their Teaching Peace Project. She is arranging a meeting
in June for Superintendents of Schools in the towns of Darien, Norwalk,
New Canaan, Stamford and Greenwich to explore the development of conflict
resolution education in their public schools. They will share initiatives
already begun and will consider working on a regional level to develop
a curriculum for conflict resolution, K-12. This will include peer mediation
programs, anger management programs and diversity awareness programs.
A committee under New York Yearly Meeting’s Ministry and Counsel Coordinating
Committee has been formed to discern ways to respond to conflicts that
arise within our monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings. Its work will
be enhanced as more Monthly Meeting members learn the skills of mediation.
The nurture of Friends led to the ministry of mediation needs strengthening
by their Monthly Meetings and upholding by our Yearly Meeting.
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