Yearly Meeting 2024: Preparation - part ten
The Friend’s reports from Yearly Meeting preparation sessions and special interest meetings continues
Ellis Brooks and Izzy Cartwright, from Quaker Peace & Social Witness’s peace education team, led a session on Hope and imagination: peace education in 2024. Peace education is ‘multilayered’, said Ellis, incorporating ‘our personal sense of wellbeing’ and the skills needed to cultivate peace ‘at the interpersonal level’. The next layer of thinking, said Izzy, is about ‘our communities’ and the relational approach set out in QPSW’s Peace at the Heart publication. This includes how schools can be democracies, she said, describing how some have councils, and others pause the school day for different age groups to interact. The outer layer, she said, is thinking about international justice and our relationship to the earth. Young people are often concerned about the climate crisis and armed conflict, said Izzy, ‘so we don’t want to leave a sense of helplessness’.
In breakout rooms, Friends discussed the role of imagination in witness, before watching a video describing the impact of peace education in schools, putting peacemaking into ‘the hands of the children’, building emotional understanding, and skills ‘to repair the harm when things go wrong’.
In addition to advocacy, the team of three – including Ben Harper – also delivers peace education training to teachers, through university and online courses, with content developed by Woodbrooke and the Open University. Recent successes include securing external funding to train sixth formers in peer mediation, who will then train younger peers, who will then train primary school pupils. The team also produces guidance and classroom resources to support the Quaker concern of challenging militarisation in schools.
‘We specifically try to make resources that wouldn’t exist without our, and our partners’, work,’ said Ellis. The aim is to give teachers confidence that, even though some of the material might be ‘daunting’ (Israel and Palestine, for example), it enables young people to discuss them with ‘imagination and hope’.
One Friend asked if the team informs pupils about peace studies and Quaker fellowships. ‘We do plug higher education opportunities,’ said Ellis. Friends have taken part in career fairs, with Quaker stalls standing beside army recruitment ones.
Tim Gee, the general secretary of the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) World Office, along with Antony Froggett, Susan Seymour, Tracey Martin and Ruth Homer from Quaker World Relations Committee (QWRC), joined thirty Friends at FWCC: Living the spirit of ubuntu, to share the issues that will be explored in the FWCC World Plenary Meeting.
The Plenary, in South Africa and online, will be on the theme: ‘Living the Spirit of Ubuntu: Responding with hope to God’s call to cherish creation and one another’. It will include the streams of: ubuntu, care for creation, and healing historical and continuing Injustice.
FWCC was founded following a similar event to the World Plenary, and is one of the ways we maintain ourselves as a world family of Friends.
‘By ubuntu you have been saved.’
Tim explained that the term ‘ubuntu’ originates from the Nguni Bantu languages of Southern Africa, and represents the philosophical concept of interconnectedness between all things and people. In translations of the Bible, ‘ubuntu’ is used in Jeremiah to mean ‘righteousness’, and in Ruth to mean ‘kindness’, and often to mean ‘grace’, with Tim sharing one particular translation: ‘it is by ubuntu you have been saved’.
Ubuntu is so important to Southern African Quakerism that it is the utmost spiritual thing they want global Quakers to consider. It is a way of vocalising the innate interdependence, co-being, and communion, of all people, animals and plants.
Tim shared that, in this context of healing injustices, ubuntu is about truth and reconciliation. By addressing injustices and our broken relationships we can return to a state of ubuntu globally.
Writing by: Lis Burch, a trustee of the Friend; Rebecca Hardy, journalist at the Friend; Imi Hills, a freelancer from West Weald Meeting; Joseph Jones, editor of the Friend; Alastair Reid, a trustee of the Friend; and Elinor Smallman, production manager at the Friend.
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