Published three times a year, Quaker Concern shares stories from the work of Canadian Friends Service Committee (Quakers). Each edition of Quaker Concern including brief highlights in the Keeping up with Friends section. These highlights touch on recent educational materials, open letters, news, and events relevant to our work.
Keeping up with Friends shares content from all of our program work, touching on criminal justice, Indigenous peoples’ human rights, and peace issues. It sometimes invites readers to take specific actions as led.
Each of the issues mentioned briefly in this section of Quaker Concern is described in more detail on our main website https://quakerservice.ca and so the items in Keeping Up usually link to specific parts of that site.
Quakers condemn systemic racism, commit to act In response to horrific acts of police violence against Black people and Indigenous people in the US and Canada, CFSC was part of two statements condemning systemic racism and calling for major changes: https://quakerservice.ca/racism and https://quakerservice.ca/policeviolence Webinars on right relationship with Indigenous peoples We have been part of…
CFSC expresses solidarity with Wet’suwet’en people Coastal GasLink is in the process of creating a pipeline, which crosses territories of many Indigenous Nations, including the Wet’suwet’en. Intimidation and arrests have been used against nonviolent Indigenous land defenders. CFSC has shared our deep concerns; called for respectful, good faith dialogue; and expressed our solidarity with the…
CFSC welcomes new program coordinator Nancy Russell! We’re pleased to announce that Nancy Russell has joined our team as the part-time Criminal Justice Program Coordinator. Nancy is also currently a part-time faculty member at Humber College and until recently held the position of Advocate at the Office of the Ontario Child Advocate for ten years.…
New resource on writing territory acknowledgements Have you ever been to an event that began with an acknowledgment that it was taking place on the territory of particular Indigenous peoples? Have you wondered what goes into such a statement? CFSC has released a two-page handout to help with thinking through and making territory acknowledgments. The…
CFSC on the CBC CFSC’s criminal justice program coordinator Verena Tan was interviewed on CBC’s The Sunday Edition at the beginning of April. Verena and host Michael Enright discussed CFSC’s research suggesting that judges may not be considering the impacts on children when sentencing parents. With well over a million listeners we hope this interview…
Video explains how a Department of Peace could make a difference CFSC program assistant Keira Mann narrates a five minute video The Story of the Rohingya: Imagine Another Way. It considers what a Department of Peace might do to coordinate efforts to prevent and respond to atrocities. 2018 report on Friends and reconciliation In…
Separating children from parents Many of us have seen chilling images from the US of child refugees who are terrified and extremely distressed after being forcefully separated from their parents. A new blog post by CFSC says this highlights the importance of Article 9 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Every child…
CFSC welcomes Verena Tan We’re pleased to welcome Verena Tan as the new program coordinator for CFSC’s criminal justice work! Verena has a lot of experience in working with people who have been harmed by the current system. During the course of her law degree in Australia, Verena worked in grassroots defence of Indigenous people.…
Synthetic Biology Since the last issue of Quaker Concern we’ve been busy: releasing a new position paper on synthetic biology to grapple with the tough questions, working with partners to host a successful international conference, bringing together synthetic biology critics, enthusiasts, and many just trying to understand the far-reaching implications, and releasing news updates full…
No Way to Treat a Child One of Canada’s closest allies is systematically mistreating children, and Canada is turning a blind eye. The United Nations reports that for a Palestinian child thought to have thrown a stone, “[T]he common experience… is being aggressively awakened in the middle of the night by many armed soldiers…