New Garden Friends Meeting Anti-racism group agreed that our work falls into two categories:
- Examine and learn more about our racism as a faith community, and as Quakers.
- Guide New Gardeners towards information that will enable all of us to better understand our institutional racism and apply this knowledge to improving our function and work as a faith community that is committed to equality.
Our goal in this work is to live into our testimony of equality with more integrity. We want to be sure that our actions as a community fall in line with our commitment to that testimony.
The anti-racism group continues to meet twice a month. We recently completed several efforts working with RE during the Adult Forum:
- On March 27, we facilitated a discussion focused on Vanessa Julye’s Epilogue from the book, “Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice”.
- On April 3 we conducted a virtual tour of the meeting house with a focus on Julye’s How to create a welcoming and inclusive Quaker community. In the month of March we also facilitated in-person tours and left material for our community to conduct tours independently.
We are currently in the process of consolidating the feedback from the tours. The feedback covered a number of topics related to the meeting house. In May, we will finalize the feedback with two purposes in mind:
- Share feedback with relevant committees that might want to address feedback from the tours that was important but not specifically anti-racist.
- Prepare recommendations to bring to Monthy Meeting that could make our meeting house feel more welcome and align with our anti-racism goals.