A poem
Beginnings with Nurture Committee
We hope that Nurture will foster more willingness to give and receive personal support within our Quaker community. I have learned something about help and equality both through conversations within Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) and New York Yearly Meeting’s ARCH (Aging Resources Consultation Help) program. It is a form of privilege culture to project a status imbalance between those who give help and those who receive help. This is not just or healthy in terms of our humanity and spiritual practice. We receive the loving spirit from any experience in giving and receiving from the heart.
Buffalo Quakers and the Network of Religious Communities (Part 3)
Church of the Wild
In late January, seventeen Friends from Buffalo and Orchard Park Meetings met on a mild day in a Church of the Wild experience to connect with nature. Held at Sue Tannehill’s home on Tonawanda Creek, participants listened and communed with each other and the other-than-human beings in the environment. Fellowship followed with a potluck indoors
Friends Decision-Making and Clerking
Buffalo Justice and Peace Library
Buffalo and Orchard Park Friends Meetings are collaborating with Friends Peace Teams North America to start a new Buffalo Justice and Peace Library! The hope is to organize community volunteers to nurture personal relationships across diverse communities in Buffalo, as we are one of the most segregated cities in the United States. Sharing skills and knowledge goes a long way in creating just, peaceful communities and families.
Resettling one refugee family at a time
We’re a rag-tag team of over 100 volunteers named Kathy’s Happy Helpers, after our founder, Kathy E. Our two-year-old group collects home goods, then cleans and furnishes apartments for refugees. Under the direction of several Buffalo resettlement agencies, we prepare for the “strangers” that Jesus commanded us to care for, and like our name says, we do it happily.
Buffalo FCNL Advocacy Team joins NY FCNL Team
Untitled Poem (A fall haiku)
Who Is My Neighbor When Black Lives Matter?
Winter solstice 2020. It’s always dark near Christmas but that year all seemed especially bleak. A covid vaccine was on the horizon, but even those of us designated as elderly would have to wait for months before our turn to be inoculated. Fear of disease, hospitalization, and death crippled our connections and made us afraid to be close to each other during our most joyous season.
The Walk of Abraham
In 2005, in an effort to reach out to the community and to become better known in an era of Islamophobia, Faith leaders from many traditions and the community at large was invited to break the fast together with MPAC providing a celebratory meal. All was free, though donations of food and money were suggested.
Love Community Action (LCA) to support Racial Justice Corporate Witness
Recently LCA had a meeting with Ministry and Council where we proposed the Buffalo Friends make a commitment to Corporate Witness to stand for Racial Justice in our community. Corporate Witness is important because it supports us developing and maintaining projects together, it supports learning across the meeting, and can support a more unified and robust presence and impact in our community. Corporate Witness can also bring the awareness and support of the Buffalo Friends meeting behind individual efforts of individual friends who have followed leadings.
Friends Committee on National Legislation
You may have heard or read about the efforts of the Friends Committee on National Legislation to form teams of Friends (including non-Friends who sympathize with our peace testimony) in as many states as possible to lobby our representatives in Congress to foster peace with their votes rather than further “defense” spending.
A few of us in the Rochester meeting undertook developing an advocacy team in Monroe County, and this is what I learned.
FCNL Teams in New York Advocate for Investing in Peace
New York Quakers from Friends Committee for National Legislation (FCNL) Advocacy Groups in New York met with Senator Gillibrand’s staff, Ben Lebowitz, Legislative Aide for Defense, Foreign Policy, and Homeland Security, on June 29, 2023. It was a short meeting, only 15 minutes, but it seemed to make an impression.
No Fault Marriage
Last month was Mess-Up Month for my husband and me: There was the overdrawn checking account; the flight one of us erroneously cancelled, having to last-minute book at twice the price; a flight reserved with a layover, when it could have been direct — and for less; the credit card one of us “lost,” then cancelled, only later to be found under some papers.
Assisting in the garden at LMUMC
Buffalo Quakers have been providing help all summer with the Lincoln Memorial United Methodist Church garden which produces a variety of vegetables and herbs in 22 raised beds. Spirit animates Nature to grow, grow, grow in this most abundant of seasons, and the garden now is overflowing with produce.
Broadening Your Quaker Horizons
Envisioning a Moral Economy
Tom Head is a Quaker economist who believes we must help “bring a moral vision to economic life.” Relying on the discipline of formal economics, he says, is not the answer because it rarely sees itself as connected to morality and religion. If we want to build an economic system that benefits all, answers to questions about what is the “morally right thing to do?” must come from beyond the discipline of economics. We need economists to take that step beyond and envision how things ought to be. For example, “What might a good economy look like?”
Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) is Growing in Buffalo
The Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) is growing in Buffalo, and those of us in Buffalo Monthly Meeting involved are excited to join other members of the local community in building a more just and peaceful Western New York by establishing a regular schedule of community AVP workshops in Buffalo.