Daquanna Harrison’s first Gathering of Friends was at Haverford in 2024. She led a workshop that asked How Will Quakers Change the World … Again? One participant credited Daquanna for bringing “hope, joy, and perseverance to my social justice work.”

Her second Gathering was online in 2025, where she delivered an opening plenary that one Friend described as “electrifying.”

For the months in between these events, Daquanna served a key role on the working group tasked with reforming FGC’s governance model.

Who is this weighty Friend? Where did she come from and what will she do next?

Becoming a Friend

Growing up Baptist in South Carolina, there were things that did not sit right with Daquanna when it came to religion — particularly inequalities between women and men. She wanted to find a spiritual home that fit with her values. In 2008, her best friend suggested she check out Quakers. They adventured together to attend a few meetings. Over several years, her casual interest deepened as Daquanna heard about “above and beyond” gestures, like having non-gendered bathrooms at a Quaker summer camp and having scholarships designated for Friends of Color. She found her way home to Adelphi Friends Meeting. 

“It’s been such a loving example of community,” she beams. “Not a perfect example, because that is the beauty of community — the imperfections and the working through it. We’ve had really hard moments. We’ve had great moments that would not have happened without some of the hard moments. I feel safe there all the time — emotionally, physically, spiritually.”

Daquanna also came to feel at home at Baltimore Yearly Meeting, where she began working with BYM’s Global Majority Caucus. (Its name draws from the fact that at the global level, people of color are the majority). This led her to attend an FGC retreat for Friends of Color, where she met Quakers from across North America and began to understand some of what FGC was doing.

“We need to dispel this myth that there aren’t people of color in Quakerism,” she asserts. “Geographically, we may be spread out. That’s why I really respect FGC for bringing us together.”

Governance Committee

During an FGC Friends of Color retreat, Daquanna first met Vanessa Julye, author of Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship, and a decades-long advocate and staff member supporting FGC’s Ministry on Racism. Once Daquanna overcame her “fangirl” enthusiasm, they began a meaningful conversation and friendship.

It was Vanessa who invited Daquanna to join FGC’s governance committee. FGC was looking for people with certain skills. Daquanna’s degrees from Howard, American and Duke universities include a specialization in nonprofit management, and the consulting firm she runs offers DEI and leadership training. She fit the bill on skills, and she had something else they were looking for — no prior knowledge of or involvement with FGC’s current governance structure. Daquanna respected what the committee was trying to do – make changes to improve the accessibility, agility, and effectiveness of the governance structure. An initial proposal for these changes was approved last fall, and this work is now shifting to the care of an implementation committee. Some things on her calendar that would have kept her too busy to volunteer suddenly shifted. As Friends say, way opened. She said yes.

While she had no experience on Central Committee, FGC’s current governing body, Daquanna had noticed and appreciated a common theme among Quakers — the older generation seems to hunger for healthy succession. As the mother of a 14-year-old daughter, this meant a lot. “I saw elders at the Gathering nurturing a younger person they knew, intentionally wanting to introduce them to someone, or making sure they were in certain spaces. It was the full spectrum of people being intentional to make room for someone new, and also just enjoying genuine intergenerational connections.”

She was glad to see this was a guiding principle among the governance committee. “We were very intentional to have numbers and expectations when it comes to the participation of youth, as well as LGBTQIA and Friends of Color,” Daquanna explains. “And yes, it’s going to be hard to reach those numbers. But if we believe in inclusion and anti-racism, we can’t settle for thinking, ‘because it’s hard we shouldn’t do it.’ The only real hard part is asking ourselves, ‘do we not have any of these people, or are we having to engage with people we haven’t been acknowledging?’”

To support a new governance structure, Daquanna suggests monthly and yearly meetings get more young people, LGBTQIA folks, and Friends of Color clerking, so that by the time FGC is looking for board volunteers, a diverse group of people have some experience. She’s encouraged by FGC’s Many Hands Make Light Work program, which offers clerk training to young people.

“Young people have such high expectations of fairness or inclusivity,” she observes. “I love the depth of their questions… we are worried about the wrong things with the youth. I hear people say, ‘they don’t know this or that.’ We are the ones responsible for them knowing those things!” She laughs, “People are mad that kids don’t know how to use can openers. Well good! We’re eating whole foods now — what y’all mad at?”

Daquanna recognizes that adding new and younger voices to FGC’s governance will have its challenges. “Yes, someone will come on who doesn’t have previous board experience. Yes, you might need to coach them on the alphabet soup of Quakerism. That doesn’t mean the new structure isn’t working. And keep in mind, we were okay with the old structure when it included people we just knew for a long time; people we could sit beside and joke with and knit and crochet. Those things are great for socializing, but there is also an organization to be run.”  

The Plenary

Daquanna’s plenary at the 2025 Online Gathering began with technical difficulties. The powerful songs she’d planned to share would only play at an almost imperceptible volume. She was not rattled. She posted the lyrics for Friends to read what they could not hear. With a Zoom “house” packed and centered in worship, she began to “preach.”

“Spirit comes to us first as internal feelings, as a whisper,” she began. “Next, it’s a tap, proceeded by a nudge. Then a slap, a kick, a punch, then a flood, et cetera — trying to get our attention. We have so many early warning systems, yet we are so detached that we no longer feel them. Or we have so misjudged that we completely ignore. On a personal level, this may be learned behavior from our upbringing. On a social level, it may be the learnings of our caste system that teaches us that someone’s skin, educational level, genitals, comfort with English, or economic status matters more than who a person is in this world.”

 “We are dimming our lights for fear of what people will think of us,” she shared. “The people [from our Quaker history] that we now uphold as heroes — the humanitarians, the justice leaders, etc. They were considered fanatics during their time. What if those people who were on the right side of justice had support and backing for their leadings early on? What would have happened?” Drawing on data points from the Civil War and from lynchings, she asks what effect earlier interventions might have had — on how many lives were lost, and how richly those lives might have been lived.

“We are at a fork in the road, as our Quaker ancestors were. We must decide if our jobs and our wealth and our comfort are more important than another’s freedom. I know it is not easy. It may be hard for some of you to critically look at our Quaker ancestors in this way. Others might be thinking: ‘How will our Quaker ancestors and our descendants look at what we did in 2025. How did we respond to the Refiner’s Fire?’ Because we surely need to have a response.” She challenged, “The question you need to ask — the question you need to answer — is whose well-being, whose death, whose extinction is your comfort worth?”

Daquanna didn’t just deliver the plenary at the 2025 Online Gathering. She delivered a plan. After a deeply moving reminder of our history, our failings, our values, and the current crisis of power and corruption, she had breakout rooms ready to go, where Friends could turn their inspiration into action in the areas of social, economic and environmental justice, immigrant rights, and peace making. She had breakout rooms staffed with volunteers from and organizers from Ujima Friends Peace Center, Quaker Earthcare Witness, Earth Quaker Action Team, Friends Committee on National Legislation, American Friends Service Committee, World BEYOND War. She didn’t tell any of these groups what to do; she trusted them. She gave them 25 minutes and trusted that each of them knew the best ways to activate hundreds of volunteers in that period of time.

At the end of the night, she referenced Bayard Rustin’s suggestion that we need “troublemaking angels.” She offered the query, “what if those angels don’t look like and talk like and act like what you expect? Will you be able to hear them?” She shared another song, Stand Up from the soundtrack of Harriet. With the lyrics shared on screen, Daquanna joined hundreds of participants, listening in almost silent worship. Suddenly the music surged. Daquanna’s face filled with wonder and tears. Tech volunteers and staff were speechless. With no human intervention, a whisper became a flood of sound.   

What’s next?

Like everything she’s ever done with the Religious Society of Friends, from joining her monthly meeting’s Peace & Social Concerns committee to restructuring the governance model for FGC, Daquanna will tell you, “the power is in the ask.”

Daquanna sounds at peace with not knowing what she’ll do next. She’s not currently on Central Committee, but if the implementation committee is able to roll out the governance structure that she helped create, she says she would be interested in serving. “That probably gives me a year, year and a half,” she estimates, thoughtfully. She has plenty to keep her busy until then — with work, with parenting, and with nurturing her spiritual life.

“It’s been a beautiful engagement to be in a religious society that respects what I have felt for a really long time — a stronger deeper connection to realms and worlds beyond what we feel or know on a consistent basis. And then to be able to talk about it — to say ‘spirit’ and know it might not mean what other people mean when they say it, because there is so much unknown. All of those pieces fit … And I think it’s especially because I was seeking that this all means so much to me.”