Peace and Social Concerns committee meeting, 7/22/13

Present: George M, Carol L, Ann L, Adele S-P, Roger C, and Daniel G

We began with a time of silence followed by a time of sharing around the Treyvon Martin incident and its aftermath and implications.

We read the annual report that Andy has written, and we approved it heartily and with thanks.

Letter writing in August: Adele offered to do it, probably on urging and thanking our legislators for supporting the recent peace initiative with Iran, replacing belligerence with cooperation.

We thank Andy for offering to do the fourth-Sunday FCNL-type announcement if Beth is unavailable.

We agreed to cosponsor the August 13 Buz Eisenberg meeting. We will donate $25 from our budget for it, and Roger will represent us at a planning meeting tomorrow, July 23.

Film series: nobody volunteered to run it next year, so we will wait a while and hope for a volunteer. Carol may be tending toward taking this on; she will think about it and decide by our next meeting. Dan suggested that Joe Fenstermaker may be a good source of information about films for the series.

We do not know whether there are any remaining FCNL “War is not the Answer” signs. If there are, George will invite Friends to take any that may be left.

An AFSC retreat was held at MtToby a few weeks ago, and Adele attended. She gave a very positive report about the retreat and the AFSC. Although there is some concern that the AFSC may have taken on too much, its activities have been productive and Adele feels that there is a good feeling of “pulling together” in the organization.

The AFSC is having a “birthday party” to celebrate its 45^th year of existence since it started in the basement of Frances Crowe. The party will be from 3 to 6 on Sunday, September 15^th.

Connecticut River cleanup project: Susan has done some initial investigating and she offers to be the Franklin County coordinator. Daniel has agreed to be the Hampshire County coordinator. Either Dan or Roger (if Dan is not present) will ask for a “straw poll” for who might want to participate, so that we could make at least a crude guess about the number of volunteers we might have. The cleanup is on Saturday October 5, unfortunately the very time of our own Quarterly Meeting for which the Climate Witness Committee is in charge of the program, taking them out of the Cleanup crew for this year. Adele will work with Susan to put an article in the next meeting newsletter about the river cleanup.

At our September meeting, the committee will discern who will be the clerk for the year. There was hope that Andy would be willing to continue.

George highly recommended the book “The New Jim Crow” for our reading on issues of race and class. Roger noted that most of the handouts in the packet Adele created for the discussion of race and class are now on our website, via the Action tab, or via the tab for our committee.

We closed with a period of silence.