Creating Relationships across Cultures: Three Stories

Learn ways to form relationships with community partners that lead to significant community outcomes. Dialogue with visitors who tell the story of their partnering projects and envision possibilities for one’s own community. Experiment with ways to communicate across racial and cultural divides. Participants will leave the workshop with awareness and plans for beginning a project…

Workshop Description

Learn ways to form relationships with community partners that lead to significant community outcomes. Dialogue with visitors who tell the story of their partnering projects and envision possibilities for one’s own community. Experiment with ways to communicate across racial and cultural divides.

Participants will leave the workshop with awareness and plans for beginning a project in their own settings that bridges cultural boundaries to build relationships and community. To build that bridge, we will identify something we deeply care about with the intent to seek those from a different culture who share that same concern. The expertise may lie in those we seek. To help us, we will have guest presenters from three diverse projects, one to restore a neighborhood, another on mentoring underserved youth, and the other that is a cross cultural theater group. The workshop leaders have experienced the results of venturing out of our accustomed circle to share with others, those more closely acquainted with the need, to relieve a problem and the suffering it causes. There is joy and Spirit in it.

On Monday we will begin with grounding ourselves with prayer.
We will create a safe and respectful place for each other and explore how to create safe and respectful places.
We will identify what we most deeply care about in all phases of our lives.
Then we will explore ways to discover affinities as we work in small groups.

Tuesday, again we will begin with prayer, silent and verbal.
Our guests will be from Historic Fair Hill where Quakers and local leaders worked together over time to transform a neighborhood for those who live there while restoring an historic Quaker burial ground.
We can interact with them and ask them questions about key elements in how they did it.
Returning our attention to our own projects, we will begin to map the concerns of our own communities.

Wednesday we begin with a spiritual grounding.
Our guests will be from Men Who Care and the project that developed with participation of Quakers. Men Who Care will describe their vision and their dedication to and creative ways of mentoring youth. They will describe how the project that is called ARCS (Associated Resources for Community Schools) sparked and grew. They will identify key elements of what made it possible. Again, we can ask questions.
There will be time to consider possibilities for our own communities.

Thursday, following spiritual grounding, our guests, with whom we can interact, will be from EgoPo a theatrical company dedicated to giving voice in dramatic form to various cultures and to dialogue across cultures. For example, they presented a play of Langston Hughes, The Ways of White People, from the Harlem Renaissance, that brought the audience in close contact with the actors and action.. We will have time to elaborate on our own projects.

Friday we follow our practice of grounding in the Spirit and work alone and in small groups to sketch out our own possible projects and the steps they might take. We will share and collaborate. We will we have a ceremony of the completion of a beginning.

Leader Experience

JoAnn Seaver has been a teacher of teachers at University of Pennsylvania and has led workshops on Experiment with Light. She has served as clerk of our meeting. Valerie Anderson is a social worker and works in schools on a contract basis for Artwell bringing enrichment activities. She has competently led book discussion groups in our meeting. We are both active members of Green Street Meeting in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.