Dreaming Sanctuary: An Intergenerational LGBTQ+ Gathering

If you are seeking funds or alternate payment options to participate in this program, please wait to register and first complete our Financial Assistance Application.

This retreat will offer a refuge space for renewal, rejuvenation, and relationship building at Pendle Hill, a Quaker center open to all for retreat, learning, and community. This gathering will bring together LGBTQ+ participants from a range of ages and spiritual backgrounds, providing an opportunity to break bread together, recenter in openness to the Spirit, and create new connections as we celebrate what nourishes and sustains us across the generations.

We will explore inherited spiritual practices that sustained our queer ancestors, including the fundamental practice of building shared spiritual community.

This program is intended as an affinity space for participants who share a lived experience as an LGBTQ+ individual. If you do not share that experience, we thank you for your interest in this program, and for supporting this community by considering a different opportunity.

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Leaders

,O  (S/He ? They) is a Friend and co-clerk of the Racial Healing and Wholeness Committee at Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting. They engage in environmental racial justice work as a community activist in the Philadelphia area. They have served as Elder for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PhYM) and have facilitated programming for PhYM’s Annual Sessions Spiritual Formation Retreat. ,O has also led “On Truth & Transformation” workshops with PhYM’s Quaker Life Counsel, exploring the transformative practice of deep listening to increase our capacity for healing through compassionate responses to incidents of racial wounding.

Cai Quirk (they/them) is a lifelong Quaker with passions for Witness, personal discernment, and diverse methods of spiritual deepening. Their ministry includes multidisciplinary art in projects such as “Transcendence: Queer Re-story-ation” and “Queer Temple.” Cai has facilitated hundreds of talks and workshops around the country, including for many Quaker organizations and meetings. You can learn more about them and their work at caiquirk.com.

Frances Kreimer (she/they) is a queer Jewish educator and the Education Director of Pendle Hill. She previously taught and directed Villanova University Law School’s Clinic for Asylum, Refugee, and Emigrant Services, focusing on mental health, trauma healing, and movement lawyering. She is drawn to Pendle Hill’s experiment in spiritual learning community as a space to imagine the world we are building together.

Kody Gabriel Hersh (they/he) is a queer, trans Quaker youth worker whose work has centered around building safe and inclusive intergenerational community, supporting youth leadership, working for justice, and preventing abuse. They are the author of the  Friends Journal  article “A Gospel of Quaker Sexuality” and a former presiding clerk of Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Concerns. They live on the ancestral lands of Tiwa-speaking peoples in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and serve as Friends General Conference’s Young Adult and Youth Ministries Coordinator. They love queer YA novels, vegan dessert, and good trouble.

Mariam I. Habib (she/her) holds courageous, generative space for growth and transformation. She is a therapist, facilitator, and educator rooted in the liberatory power of love, empathy, and human dignity. As a queer bicultural person, Mariam is well-versed in helping people navigate the complexity of identity, belonging, purpose, and path. She holds a particular commitment to trauma survivors, queer folks, immigrants, and people of color, and strives to help all her clients develop an authentic and joyful sense of self. Using relational, contemplative, and somatic practices, she helps people move through difficulty and return to our inherent wholeness. She brings an intersectional and anti-oppressionist perspective to all her work.

nova sturrup (all pronouns) is a whimsical wonderer interested in worship and the ways faith informs imaginings and realities regarding community, belonging, and inclusion. nova’s eyes light up in conversation about the role of technology in spiritual education, liberation theologies, black literature as sacred text, and art-making as everyday ritual and spiritual practice. nova is the creator and facilitator of the black femme bible study, a sacred text workshop series rooted in the Truth of the black American experience as theologically and spiritually significant. nova currently serves the Religious Society of Friends as the Community Organizer of the New York Quarterly Meeting.

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