Quaker Updates

“The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”

What touchstones, teachings, and traditions can Quakers draw on to nourish and guide our outward lives and activism?

We spoke with two FCNL constituents to learn why advocacy is personal to them.

In honor of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, students at Carolina Friends School decided to take action for justice. Together, they wrote letters to their senators urging them to advance legislation to address many of the pressing issues of our day, including the climate crisis, access to health care, police brutality, gun violence, and more.

FCNL’s weekly Witness Wednesday Silent Reflection is a time to step out of doing and connect to what motivates and sustains us in this work.

I am personally very dedicated to the national Quaker lobby organization, the Friends Committee on National Legislation. For most of the past twenty-five years I have attended their annual meeting in D.C., and I joined the 2020 event online from home where gathered for four days of worship, organizational meetings, and to virtually lobby of our elected officials.

Each month, FCNL brings individual Friends’ witness in the world into conversation with Quaker advocacy work through our Quaker Changemaker event series. Here are some highlights from this past years’ events.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) brings Friends’ spiritual values and testimonies to bear on U.S. public policy decisions, guided by the legislative priorities below.

This has indeed been a year of reckoning—of challenges so big and so constant we cannot turn away. Reckoning with the election; the coronavirus pandemic; systemic racism of our country; and the continued destruction of our planet.