Financial Solutions
- Hire administrative support for a meeting
- Quaker marital counseling and parenting counseling
- Salaried clerkship
- Hire enough folks to expand the children’s programming and how it welcomes families
- Relationship support and resources
- Hire someone to work with teens & middle schoolers
- Open discussions about money
- Uber service to bring in new people
- Advertisements in local newspapers on a weekly basis
- Offer shelter to everyone who wants it
- Being proactive about financial support for those going through a hard time
- Dedicated food pantry necessities for anyone in need
- Quaker schools/CCRCS tax
- Anyone who mentions a concern for budget must tithe for the next year
- Discussion on how to spend money on community engagement
- Meeting budgets half of discretionary funds to reparations
- Pay religious education ministers
- Open your homes to house the unhoused. Talk to them during their stay
- Meeting gives their land to indigenous and black farmers
- Open schools to students who can’t afford Friends education. Reduce the price significantly
- Invest in land tax to indigenous tribes
- Pay Friends who cannot volunteer for free
- Pay ten people good resources to be Quaker outreach people
- Train spiritual mediators to help with interpersonal conflict
- Religious denominations return or compensate indigenous tribes for land they stole to build their churches and organizations
- Bring Quaker Voluntary Service interns to town and provide a house for them to live in as a hook-up to work on needs in our town, such as housing or immigrant rights
- Invest in land tax to indigenous tribes
- Being proactive about financial support for those who are laboring for the community, including emotional labor
Social Solutions
- Include/involve English Language Learners
- Authentic dance and movement together
- Share delicious food every day
- Need adults who are relatable and look like our students
- Make meeting more accessible and welcoming to families
- Listening project
- Becoming mediating space to discuss divisive politics (ie Braver Angels)
- Loving young children and families and thus acting like it! And support them, dammit.
- Community service projects
- Provide childcare
- Fun outings
- Volunteer service
- Great food
- Presence with the cot shelter
- Ensure that each person is noticed and known
- Active involvement in climate change solutions
- Social events like movies & snacks, lunches, nature walks
- Ever deepening understanding that we are one, we are family, we are kin
- Celebrations and parties for good things when they happen
- Musicians
- Small, intimate community activities, dinners, game nights
- Trips and retreats
- Elder care compassion and p[could not understand] with young people
- Conflict resolution and restorative practices training
- Community organizing (+2)
- Invite and welcome folks who do not normally attend
- Music
- Dialogue within neighborhood
- Open House
- Children, childcare, games & learning for kids
- Time with animals
- Active partnering with other religious organizations
- Quaker stand up
- Engagement with the town’s racial justice work
- Youth groups and retreats
- Outreach in public and charter schools, senior centers, veterans organizations, and incarcerated people
- Partnering with community groups on community concerns
- Offering workshop for wider community on a community need that friends can offer/educate/help with
- A potluck where everyone tries out a new recipe
- Stop the grind. Lay down/lift up
- Can we experiment?
- Ban BIPOC from meetings until white members stop being racist
- Ban members from meeting for worship and force them to go to DEI workshops until racism stops
- Whole meeting retreat
- Offer sessions that help develop awareness of harm and building community
- Send leadership to Group Relations conference
- Gamify anti-racism: use noticing oppression and faith tool. Person with most noticings wins dinner
- Spiritual buddy program across demographics
- Monthly meetings for dancing
- Participatory narrative inquiry project to expand perspectives
- Meeting has 12 Quaker social change ministry groups
- Meeting budgets $1,500,000 for reparations and Black members later decide disbursement
- Noticing practices as harm
- Noticers are celebrated
- Required readings
- Spiritual storytelling workshops and retreats
- REAL hospitality with good food
- Regular conversations about white supremacy and culture so that folks learn to recognize it
- Have clear and consistent restorative practices
- Exposure therapy
- Whole meeting retreat
- Group discussions/listening sessions
- Change the time of Meeting for Worship
- Decenter whiteness by prioritizing BIPOC spaces and activities
- Alternatives to Violence-style programming for community building and re-envisioning
- Provide mentorship to younger members of the community
- Midweek/evening Meeting for Worship
- Multigenerational picnic for fun together
- Antiracism trainings
- Identify antiracist practices and practices that repair movement to becoming an anti-racist faith community
- Start a choir
- Have a big music festival
- Develop a culture of exploration
- Seasonal block party
- Initiate an interfaith dinner club
- Regular small-group sessions querying who we really are
- Discussion on Fear (Fear & safety vs Fear/Courage/Risk/Curiosity/Transformation)
- Active community-building, especially with neighbors
- Provide support from conception to death
Physical Solutions
- An art studio
- Visual art
- Reconfigure spaces to welcome youth and families
- Time in nature
- Residential meeting house
- Offer Quaker land for production of food/produce
- Accessible location
- Provide affordable housing
- Provide space for piano, organ, drumming, and a choir
- Reflect indigenous culture by building a space that is round and not rectangular
- Community gardens (+3) (and actually invite the community)
- Movement space
- Long walks
- More sleep
- Movement, dance, Zumba, lawn games
- A garden
- Lots of good food
- Use our property to engage and serve the community
- LEGO “Serious Play” curriculum, adapted for meeting
- Picnic, then play Flyswatter Volleyball
- Having a meeting presence with a reciprocal framing in diverse locations (Schools, neighborhoods, jails)
- Meeting houses and grounds for housing and good
- Bring a 3,000 piece puzzle to regional spring gathering
- Organize to disrupt anti-black violence with our bodies
- House individuals and families experiencing homelessness at meeting
Spiritual Solutions
- Healing one’s own trauma and committing to self-love and letting thar ripple out
- We need to stop asking the young people to do the lifting and the labor
- Much more time in intergenerational worship together practicing our faith and growing out our spiritual lives
- Access wisdom from various Friends traditions
- More grace for parents
- Individual healing and counseling for members
- Deep listening
- Be out in the community doing group-determined projects
- Have arts, music, and dance embodied
- Psychedelics
- Inreach/spiritual deepening
- We need to light the fire to busywork
- Small groups meet routinely and vulnerably
- Regular worship sharing
- Elder care/child care
- Revival!
- Queer folks at the center
- Prayer
- Change gathering(s) to fit the needs of folks who work and have families
- Use Quaker process for more important discerning
- All members are responsible for the life of the meeting
- Raise up new voices and let the weighty voices rest
- Consolidate committee structures
- Sharing/honoring failures, including spiritual journeys full of failures
- Experiment with Light
- Question your faith
- Talking about fear and modeling for each other ways to transform it
- Clear process for giving feedback to “the meeting”, re: experience of oppression; clear restorative practices process
- Awesome hospitality, a spiritual welcoming, newcomers immediately paired with a mentor
- Accessible information about Quakerism and Quakers
- All attendees in small groups
- Every meeting goes through [Part one not readable currently), and Part two, ]Racial justice journey/journal
- Incorporate an attitude and practice of spiritual playfulness
- ELEPHANT CIRCLES
- Body-centered practices to understand fear
- Sharing circles to increase trust
- Telling our origin and Quaker origin stories
- Sharing spiritual autobiographies
- Deepening of spiritual practices by individuals and the community
- Pause business meetings for a year and use that time for joy and connection
- Can we talk about building a positive future for our meeting?
- Deep study of Quaker theology about transformative power of the Light
- HMR trauma healing method taught to meetings
- Proactive discussion on what love/respect/trust look like in community
- Mandatory yearly equity and empowerment workshops for all attenders and ongoing accountability groups
- Extended meeting for questions and answers
- Invite expansive beliefs into Quakerism (other spiritual practices or non-theist friends)
- Stop teaching that Quakerism is simply the SPICES!
- Deep dive into early Quaker practices as compared to meeting practices today. (Assigned reading – deeply)
- OUTSIDE facilitator for anti-racism workshops
- Develop skills of restorative practices particularly in relation to Quaker process
- Adopt a noticing practice