Call to Action: BFM’s Identity and Role in Approaching Racism

Answering The Call To Equality:

A Threshing Session

Sunday, Oct 24 at 1:00-2:30 p.m. via Zoom

Please join us as we gather to engage in a “threshing” session. For more information and to request the Zoom link, please use our  "Contact us" form. 

We seek to clarify whether BFM wishes to take a journey toward healing the harm, reducing the impact, understanding and counteracting systemic racism within ourselves, our community, and the world.

Queries:

1.   In what way is systemic racism an area of continuing revelation on our testimonies of Equality, Integrity, and Community which calls us to concerted collective effort and action to support uprooting systemic racism and developing the “Beloved Community”?
2.    What internal work do we need to undertake in our mindset, behavior, words, processes, and systems to avoid unwittingly perpetuating systemic racism in ourselves as we seek to take collective actions to uproot it in the external world?
3.    What is the support and expertise we need to see our biases and address the resistance, pain, fear, anger, hurt, shame, and guilt that might arise, so we can move forward to effective action?
4.    What level of time and energy are we willing to commit at both an individual and community level?
5.    At what level are we prepared to pay for external expertise and how would we secure funds (budget adjustments and/or special fund-raising)? (Note: there is an offer by a family in the Meeting to make a contribution matching that of the Meeting)

Kathryn Pettus, a member of Baltimore Friends Meeting, Stony Run, has agreed to clerk this session and has provided a brief description of threshing sessions and the role of the clerk. 

• Please review her description of a Threshing Session here if you are planning to attend. 
• We hope many of you will join us to discern our way forward!

• For additional background and context, please see the Annual Report of the Change and Threshing Groups.