What We Carry, What We Build: Working Toward an Antiracist Quaker Community

Working Toward an Anti-Racist Quaker Community: Two Spaces, One Purpose This workshop brings together two intentional spaces, one for Friends of Color and one for White Friends, around a shared purpose: the deep, committed work of becoming an anti-racist Quaker community. How can we work towards becoming a community that sees Friends of Color as…

Workshop Description

Working Toward an Anti-Racist Quaker Community: Two Spaces, One Purpose

This workshop brings together two intentional spaces, one for Friends of Color and one for White Friends, around a shared purpose: the deep, committed work of becoming an anti-racist Quaker community. How can we work towards becoming a community that sees Friends of Color as an integral part of Quakerism?

Together, we will explore what makes us different and what brings us together. We will also examine how we can strengthen our relationships and work toward a common goal. This workshop is part of FGC’s ongoing Ministry on Racism work, which supports Friends in building the capacity for antiracist transformation across the Religious Society of Friends.

Antiracist Capacity Building: Where Lived Experience, Analysis, and Praxis Meet

Antiracism work is not simply about learning the right frameworks or holding the right analysis. Instead, skill and expertise in this work emerge at the intersection of three things. First, lived experience: the knowledge that is uniquely yours, shaped by your identities, spirituality, relationships, and ways of knowing. Second, (political) analysis and education: the capacity to situate that experience within broader patterns of how power moves, who it serves, and what it produces in the lives of those it marginalizes. Third, praxis: the ongoing, embodied process of putting analysis into action in the real world.

When any one of these is missing, the work of building an anti-racist Quaker community suffers. For example, analysis and praxis without lived experience remain abstract. They stay disconnected from the real costs of racism and other forms of oppression. Similarly, lived experience and praxis without analysis can leave us cycling through pain without the tools to understand or transform it. And lived experience with analysis alone, without praxis, risks staying theoretical. It never materializes into change. Therefore, the work of this workshop is to strengthen all three. To learn more about this framework, explore this graphic on antiracist capacity building.

Why a Separate Space for Friends of Color?

For Friends of Color, this work carries a particular dimension. As members of a predominantly white institution, Friends of Color rarely find the conditions necessary for inch-wide, mile-deep work. This sustained, unhurried engagement is critical to their continued development. It is also essential to the ongoing unlearning of what white supremacy teaches us about ourselves.

Too often, Friends of Color face one of two patterns. Either they are positioned as experts and given a pass on the deeper work. Or they are called upon to translate, justify, and educate, making their experiences legible to those who have not lived them. Both patterns deny Friends of Color what this workshop is designed to offer.

This workshop creates a generative and nourishing space for Friends of Color to acquire, test, and deepen their own analyses and praxis toward an anti-racist Quaker community. Moreover, it offers that space in community with one another, free from the pull to center, manage, or make space for whiteness. Specifically, that space includes naming and processing shared and divergent experiences. It also includes building solidarity across the diversity within our community. Additionally, it involves developing the intersectional analysis that allows us to hold the complexity of who we are without flattening it.

Furthermore, this work includes examining our own internalized experiences of racism and other forms of oppression and how they shape our relationships with one another, across differences of origin, background, identity, and tradition. This is not separatism. Rather, it is the necessary tending of roots that makes meaningful cross-racial work possible. Learn more about FGC’s Friends of Color programs and retreats.

The Work of White Friends

For White Friends, this workshop offers parallel and equally demanding work. Specifically, it invites White Friends to examine the internalized patterns, investments, and habits that perpetuate racism and other forms of oppression, even among those who are committed to opposing it. In addition, White Friends will practice doing that work without centering their own discomfort. Learn more about FGC’s Worship for White Friends Confronting Racism.

Coming Together

Finally, on the last day, both spaces will come together. They will engage in collective work toward an anti-racist Quaker community, guided by what each group names as most salient from their time together.

Note: The bios below are the lead facilitators. Additional facilitators for each space are to be determined.

Leader Experience

Friends of Color
Bertha Peña
Bertha is from the Global South. She has been a Quaker for about 16 years and active in FGC spaces for about 7 years. She attends meetings online — there are no Monthly Meetings where she lives — mostly attending Ujima Friends Meeting, FGC worship spaces for Friends of Color, and the Pacific Yearly Meeting online Worship Group. She has been part of committees that support youth and Friends of Color for about 11 years. She is currently the BIPOC Womxn’s Space’s main facilitator while Sabrina McCarthy is on sabbatical. She serves as co-clerk of FGC’s Ministry on Racism Committee and as a member of FGC’s governance representative council.

alicia nance (ella/elle/she/they/we) is the descendant of enslaved Africans, a Diasporic Black (gender)queer femme somatic abolitionist, storyteller, doula, disrupter, and racial justice strategist rooted in the revolutionary legacies of her ancestors. She serves as the Ministry on Racism Program Coordinator at FGC and is a member of On Earth Peace’s Antiracism Task Force (ARTT). She is also the founder of Liberated Roots/Routes Freedom Farm and Co-Executive Director of Medicine Bowl Giving Circle, both Black-led land-based liberation projects.
With nearly 35 years of antiracism work and 25+ years as a radical educator and grassroots organizer, alicia holds the mirror before the magnifying glass, a commitment to alignment between what she espouses and how she shows up. She embraces Grace Lee Boggs’s teaching that revolution is about transforming ourselves to transform the world through inch-wide, mile-deep work, and Kazu Haga’s call that spiritual practice is fierce, cultivating the courage to face reality as it is. Her work centers pro-liberation, healing-centered pedagogy; intergenerational community voice; co-conspiring; and eradicating anti-Blackness.

White Friends
Amy Rowland
Amy is an educator, a long-time social justice activist, and a grandmother. She serves as co-clerk of FGC’s Ministry on Racism Committee and as a member of FGC’s governance representative council. She also serves on the Friends for Racial Equity and Education (FREE) committee of her meeting, where she has come to understand that the mere existence of a committee focused on antiracism does not make any one person or community less racist, and that the work of becoming actively antiracist must be shared by all. Through her years in this work, Amy has learned to speak up even in worshipful spaces and to develop a critical understanding of how unconscious patterns of behavior among Friends perpetuate racism and harm. She has participated in the White Friends Confronting Racism workshops sponsored by the Ministry on Racism at FGC and brings that learning into her facilitation practice.

Sandy Kewman
Sandy is a ciswoman of European descent, mostly Germanic, who became a Quaker in 1990 after growing up Catholic. She has experience in clerking and accompaniment as an elder. She has participated in the White Friends Confronting Racism workshops sponsored by the Ministry on Racism for the last four years, the last two as part of the hosting group, and has experienced them as deeply meaningful. She was a co-facilitator in offering Eldering for Today: Anti-Racist Clerking at Ben Lomond Quaker Center in January 2026. She is imagining and learning what care of community might look like and longs to be part of creating such a liberatory community with other Friends.