Exploring Our Quaker Roots: Moving Towards Repair

This 6-month course is for Friends in Britain Yearly Meeting to deepen our engagement with Quaker reparation within a supportive and structured group. We will work together to hold the complex multiple lineages of our Quaker roots: of Quakers being both fierce advocates for social justice and abolition of slavery in Britain, and beneficiaries from as well as perpetrators of slavery and colonialism.

The course is aimed at Friends from Britain Yearly Meeting who have already started their engagement with Quaker reparations or are looking to engage more deeply, and is primarily aimed at Friends who are racialised as white, who are looking to understand what the responsibility of white Friends is in relation to the harms of the past and present. Friends from the global majority are also welcome to attend, with knowledge that this course will be grappling with themes of responsibility and repair.

Together we will be exploring:
• how to take responsibility for the harm done by our Quaker forebears in relational and material ways
• how to pick up the threads of solidarity and liberatory actions of Quakers who have gone before us
• how to heal the ways we all have been harmed by the systems of oppression and domination that shape our world, albeit in different ways.
• the physical sensations and emotions that come up for us as we sit in this inquiry, and approaches that may enable us to strengthen our ‘muscles’ for staying with discomfort, individually and together.

In asking these questions we look to understand how we may work towards social justice in our own lives, alongside other Friends, as well as shoulder to shoulder with all those engaged in building better worlds.

This course will be participatory, inviting you to enter into this inquiry with head, heart and spirit. The six live sessions will include opportunities for individual reflection, personal storytelling, small group discussion, and participation in full group, interactive activities. Between sessions, there will be a range of engaging writings, audio and video content for you to read/watch/listen to. You will be encouraged to draw on this content within sessions.

The 6-month format is offered to provide space for a slower and deeper engagement, with space for reflection and to support us in metabolising the impact of these complex and contradicting lineages of Quaker enslavement on us personally and collectively, guiding us towards action.

There will be some material to look at before the first session. We will email you around one week prior to the course with information about accessing the course, including this material, on our online learning platform (Moodle).

This course is a collaboration between Woodbrooke and the Reparation Working Group (RWG) set up by BYM Trustees to take forwards our collective commitment to explore what reparation for Quaker complicity and benefit from enslavement, colonialism and economic exploitation might mean. We will draw in resources created by the RWG, and seek to weave into the course the complexities that this group of Quakers is working with as they seek to discern a collective way forward.