Exploring a Quaker Commitment to Reparative Justice

NB: This program has reached capacity and registration is closed.

* Our European Friends are encouraged to register directly via the Woodbrooke website: https://www.woodbrooke.org.uk/courses/exploring-a-quaker-commitment-to-reparative-justice/.

Reparative justice is an essential part of living out Quaker faith. This workshop explores the spiritual imperative and deep need for Quakers to commit to repairing harms done by Quakers and others through their involvement in slavery and its afterlives.

As an approach, a goal, an ideal, and an ethos, reparations provides a promising path towards healing, repair, and transformational social change. It addresses the dimensions of Spirit, relationship, and resources. As such, it offers a tool for Quakers and Quaker communities to understand our complicity in causing harm, and to explore our options for contributing to the repair of the harms of slavery and its afterlives, the penitentiary system, and settler colonialism, past and ongoing.

This workshop will share an actionable framework for understanding reparations, and the basic concepts and skills required for successful reparative action. Participants will learn about experiments of others, discuss your own thoughts, actions, and plans, and practice applying the framework.

We will examine the patterns of behavior in Quaker meetings that may emerge around anti-racism initiatives, the beliefs that underly these behaviors, and what stops us from taking collective action.

Through resources and an online discussion forum we will explore the issue of reparative justice and relational and financial reparations.

We will gather for four live zoom sessions over a weekend, to witness where other Friends are in the process of making reparations, to learn from each other’s struggles and learnings, and to support each other in discerning our next steps in individual and corporate reparative justice.

Zoom Sessions on Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 January 2023
Zoom Session (Optional) on Friday 27 January (time to be confirmed)

Follow-Up Zoom Session (Optional) (day and time to be confirmed)

Leader(s)

Rob Peagler is co-founder and principal at reparationWorks, a think/do lab for promoting reparative thought and action. He draws on his experience co-founding the Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) at MIT, helping social change leaders find new ways to dance with their most vexing problems, and his work as a partner in The Action Mill, where he and his partners combined human-centered design with Gandhian nonviolent strategy to elicit authentic engagement, intrinsically motivated behavior change, and large scale systems change..

Lucy Duncan lives in West Philadelphia, is the Truth and Reparations Education Fellow for the Truth Telling Project, serves on the advisory council for the Grassroots Reparations Campaign, is a member of the Green Street Quaker meeting reparations committee, serves as co-chair of the Philadelphia Mayor’s Commission for Faith-based and Interfaith Affairs for which she co-leads a city-wide congregational reparations campaign, and is a co-founder/principal of reparationWorks.

Financial aid may be available. If you are seeking funds to participate in this program, click to review and complete our Financial Assistance Application and a Pendle Hill staff member will follow-up with you shortly (please do NOT register online). Thank you for your interest.

Travel directions to Pendle Hill.