by WebPost | Oct 20, 2025 | Uncategorized
On November 9, at rise of meeting, Peace and Social Concerns Committee will sponsor a presentation plus a sale of Peruvian crafts to support native artisans, strengthen communities and promote forest conservation in the Peruvian Amazon.
Campbell Plowden is the Executive Director of Amazon Ecology – the non-profit organization he founded in 2006 to help create sustainable livelihoods for artisan families, promote forest conservation and strengthen traditional communities in the Peruvian Amazon. Campbell will discuss the progress and challenges of his group training artisans to make innovative fair-trade handicrafts, help them form effective organizations, and promote the sustainable harvest and reforestation of the trees used to make woven crafts. Amazon Ecology is a member of the FairTrade Federation and sells some of its partners crafts in the US to support its artisan training programs. It reinvests part of its sales to support health, education and conservation needs in its partner communities and conducts Alternatives to Violence Project workshops to help its partners improve their communication, cooperation and non-violent conflict resolution skills.
Come- do some early Christmas shopping and learn about an organization promoting alternatives to cutting down the rainforest.
Please visit http://www.AmazonEcology.org to learn more about Amazon Ecology or purchase fair-trade crafts made by their partners. Visit http://www.AmazonAlive.net to donate to support the organization’s work.
by WebPost | Sep 30, 2025 | Peace and Social Concerns
Please join Peace & Social Concerns Committee for a fundraising luncheon on Sunday, October 12, at rise of meeting. The funds will benefit the Friends Association for Children, an organization co-founded by this meeting in 1871 with Lucy Goode Brooks, a formerly enslaved woman.
by WebPost | Sep 23, 2025 | Uncategorized
Did you know you could help Quaker House without committing to being a board member? We accept people to serve on specific committees and work on certain projects. For example, a person who couldn’t commit to meetings edited a book as it was being revised to reflect these times.
If you have experience, or interest in expanding our relationship-focused strategy for long-term financial health, please consider serving on the Quaker House Development Committee.
Quaker House is not struggling fiscally, but we are here for the long haul, as the need for our services keeps growing. Learn more about how we manifest the Peace Testimony as we help military veterans and enlisted people navigate their conscience based struggles at QuakerHouse.org.
If you feel led to know more, please reach out to Patricia Stansbury. We can talk and need be, I’ll connect you with the Membership Committee.
by WebPost | Aug 20, 2025 | Activity
Peace and Social Concerns Committee is hosting a luncheon on October 12 at rise of meeting to benefit the Friends Association for Children. Please come and learn more about FRIENDS and our connection to it. Here’s some history about the organization which opened in 1868 and came under management of black Richmond churches in 1871.Thanks to Mary Fran Hughes-McIntyre’s History of Richmond Friends Meeting for the following information.
After the Civil War, as leader of the Ladies Sewing Circle for Charitable Work, Lucy Goode Brooks, a formerly enslaved person, convinced her circle that an orphanage was needed. She asked Cedar Creek Meeting (later Richmond Friends Meeting) for help in raising money to start the home.
With Lucy, John Bacon Crenshaw, clerk of Cedar Creek Meeting, was instrumental in starting the Friends’ Asylum for Colored Orphans. Receiving contributions from the Freedman’s Bureau, Philadelphia Friends, Negro citizens of Richmond, and others, Friends established a home and school, and after three years turned it over to the “colored ministers” of the city, with the following invitation:
Friends: Deeply impressed, at the close of the late unhappy contest with the necessity for such an Institution -- Your friends the Quakers with considerable labor collected the necessary funds and erected what is now known as the Orphan House for Colored Children.... Trusting that you will appreciate the great importance of such an Institution, where the helpless orphans may be received and sheltered from the cold charities and cruel temptations of a heartless world till opportunity offers to place them in suitable homes, where they may receive the sympathy, care, and training, their sorrowful lot so much needs....
This institution was a continual place of involvement for Richmond Friends who served on the Executive Board even after it became a Community Fund enterprise in 1941.
by WebPost | Aug 20, 2025 | Uncategorized
RFM will hold our traditional Meeting for Worship and march around the neighborhood to commemorate the International Day of Peace Meeting for Worship on September 20 (not on September 21) at 6:30 pm. This is a sweet time together as we join to mark our Peace testimony on the day the United Nations has set aside to focus on peace and its creation. We hope that members will join in Richmond Peace Education Center’s (RPEC) activities and celebration of the International Day of Peace on September 21 from 11 am to 5 pm.