Vanessa Julye is a cis-gender, heterosexual woman of African and Indigenous descent who lives and works on the traditional territory of the Lenni Lenape Nation, called “Lenapehoking.” The Lenape People lived in harmony with one another upon this territory for thousands of years. She serves as a guest speaker for many Quaker meetings, Quaker schools, Quaker and secular organizations and conferences. Vanessa is working on increasing awareness of the structure of White Supremacy in the Quaker and sectarian communities. She has been recognized among Quakers as having a calling to a ministry with a concern for helping the Religious Society of Friends become a whole blessed community. Vanessa travels throughout the country and abroad, with a travel minute from Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, speaking on this topic and leading workshops about racism focusing on its eradication and the healing of racism’s wounds. She discusses overcoming the structure of White Supremacy in the Religious Society of Friends in several documentaries and articles. Vanessa meets with and provides programs for BIPOC Quakers throughout the world both in-person and virtually, many of whom are isolated members of their Quaker meetings in Canada, Mexico and the United States of America. She is Friends General Conference’s Associate Secretary for Organizational Cultural Transformation. Vanessa is a member of Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, The Fellowship of Friends of African Descent, Quakers Uniting in Publications, Ujima Friends Meeting and Ujima Friends Peace Center.

Paul Buckley is a member of Clear Creek Friends Meeting in Richmond, Indiana. In his late forties, he gave up paid employment to enroll in the Quaker Studies Program at the Earlham School of Religion. Since graduating, he has been a traveling minister and a writer on Quaker topics. He is known among Friends of all stripes for his workshops, short courses, and retreats.

Paul has felt called to bring knowledge of important Friends to modern Quakers. This has resulted in several books each on William Penn and Elias Hicks. In addition, he has a special interest in how Quakers read scripture and co-edited The Quaker Bible Reader with Stephen Angell as well as a widely used pamphlet on the Lord’s Prayer. In addition, he has written several dozen articles on Quaker history, and contemporary Quaker faith and practice.

His most recent publication is a 2023 Pendle Hill Pamphlet, Quaker Testimony: What We Witness to the World, the product of twelve years of thought and contemplation on Quaker Testimony.

Rashid Darden is a member of Friends Meeting of Washington and Associate Secretary for Communications and Outreach for Friends General Conference. He is also a novelist who focuses on the Black LGBT experience, whether in contemporary fiction or in urban fantasy. 

Barry Crossno is a member of the Monthly Meeting of Friends of Philadelphia sojourning with Cleveland Friends Meeting. He serves as the General Secretary of Friends General Conference. He brings to FGC a deep commitment to the future of the Religious Society of Friends and the  nurture and care of Friends.

David Etheridge is a member of Friends Meeting of Washington in the District of Columbia. A graduate of Earlham College, he served for two years as a VISTA volunteer and community organizer in Norfolk, VA, followed by two years as a Peace Corps volunteer training schoolteachers in the Dominican Republic. He then worked for six years doing administrative work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC and attending law school at the Catholic University of America. He worked as a lawyer in the Indian Affairs Division of the Department of the Interior Solicitor’s Office from 1976 to 2000. At FMW he was Presiding Clerk for five years. He helped create the local DC program office of the American Friends Service Committee and worked closely with that program for about 20 years. He also helped create the Baltimore Yearly Meeting Working Group on Racism in 2002 and has been its clerk since 2012.

Debbie L. Humphries has traveled in the ministry among Quakers since 2004with a concern for the spiritual health and vitality of the Religious Society of Friends. Her ministry is under the care of Hartford Monthly Meeting (Hartford, CT) and Albuquerque Monthly Meeting (Albuquerque, NM), as she resided in Connecticut from 1998 until 2020 where she worshiped with Hartford Monthly Meeting, and she moved to New Mexico in 2020 where she now worships with Albuquerque Monthly Meeting.  She is the author of Seeds That Change the World: Essays on Quakerism, Spirituality, Faith & Culture, and a Pendle Hill Pamphlet, Spreading the Fire: Challenging and Encouraging Friends through Travel in the Ministry. She teaches at the Yale School of Public Health and conducts research on public health nutrition, nutrition. and infectious disease, and community health, both within the United States and internationally.

Susan Loucks is the principal of Susan Loucks Consulting, working with organizations that are interested in creating as good a world on the inside of their organizations as they are striving to build on the outside. She designs and facilitates processes for change, planning, skill building, and organizational improvement with particular attention to broad and effective participation and power dynamics within organizations. She has worked as an organizational development consultant for nonprofits independently, with the Human and Institutional Development Forum in Bangalore, India, and with the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management at Robert Morris University. In addition to her degrees Susan has qualifications/certifications in Appreciative Inquiry, Sociocracy, Community Mediation, Grassroots Development and NGO Management, and the Art of Transformational Consulting (Social Transformation Project).

Nikki Mosgrove is an active Member of Trenton Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends and serves as Rising Clerk of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Additionally, she is on the Board of Trustees of the Friends Foundation for the Aging and the School of the Spirit Quaker Ministry. In 2019 she founded Nia Ministries. In Kiswahili, “Nia” means “purpose” and to make our collective vocation the building of our community. To that end, Nia Ministries, Inc. endeavors to provide education and spiritual guidance/training to those affiliated with the Religious Society of Friends.

A Trenton native, she holds a Bachelor’s degree from Boston College, a Master’s degree from Seton Hall University and a certificate in nonprofit management from LaSalle University’s School of Business. She currently coordinates state and federal grants for a local municipality.

Clinton Pettus is a member of the Baltimore Monthly Meeting of Friends, Stony Run, and a frequent attender at Third Haven Friends Meeting in Easton, Maryland, where he lives with his wife, Kathryn. Professionally, he spent more than 30 years as a faculty member and then college administrator. After retiring from a career in higher education, Clinton served as regional director of the Middle Atlantic Region and then deputy general secretary for Programs for the American Friends Service Committee.

Clinton’s current community service activities include serving as vice president of the board of a legal aid corporation, Shore Legal Access (Easton, Maryland), a member of the board of Acts Retirement-Life Communities of Maryland (Eldersburg, Maryland), a member of the Talbot Equity Coalition (Easton, Maryland), and co-leader of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Team of the Bayleigh Chase Retirement Community, (Easton, Maryland). Also, he is a co-founder and chief executive officer of a non-profit, Friends for the Future, Inc., that sponsors his social equity work.

At the 2021 gathering of the Friends General Conference, Clinton led an evening session titled “One Black Man’s Journey in a World of Othering.” At that time, he shared that he and a group of colleagues had developed a program to help people communicate across differences in an environment of safety and respect. Over the past three years, he and Kathryn have made presentations and trained people to lead trust circles around the mid-Atlantic region and as far west as Minnesota. Clinton looks forward to using his education and experiences to demonstrate the significance of building trusting relationships for overcoming interpersonal racism.

Emily Provance, is a member of Fifteenth Street Monthly Meeting, New York Yearly Meeting and travels in the ministry. She holds a traveling minute from the Fifteenth Street Monthly Meeting. She describes her work this way; my own unique work is with Quaker institutions, be they local meetings or regional/yearly meetings or umbrella organizations: to see where the systems and structures that we have built are supporting God’s purposes and where those systems and structures are getting in the way.  I work to see these things, to explain them, and to experiment with changing them, across this covenant people called the Religious Society of Friends.  More information is available on her Blog: Turning, Turning, Holy Experiments Among Friends and in  The Life Cycle of Meetings

Sue Regen, a member of Rochester, NY, Monthly Meeting, has been working in the area of forgiveness since 2002, Forgiveness work is part of her personal spiritual journey and is something she feels passionate about.

Since she began this work, she has led over 84 workshops including ones at Attica Prison, Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology, FGC Gathering, Powell House (NY), Ben Lomond Center (CA), Pendle Hill (PA), Woolman Hill Center (MA), Great Plains Yearly Meeting, Baltimore Yearly Meeting, Lake Erie Yearly Meeting and with many monthly meetings, including her own.  This work is under the care of Rochester Monthly Meeting, which has provided a minute of travel that is endorsed by NYYM. She is a past Presiding Clerk of Friends General Conference.


Christopher Sammond brings to this work over 30 years’ experience leading workshops and retreats for Friends, in contexts ranging from monthly meetings to yearly meetings to the World Gathering of Friends. His work has focused primarily on helping Friends to deepen in their direct experience of the Divine through a heart-centered deep dive into Quaker practice. He also brings experience as a hospice chaplain, a spiritual counselor at Hazelden, a 12-Step Treatment Center for addicts and alcoholics, as a spiritual director, serving as General Secretary of New York Yearly Meeting.