News: May 2015

New location for QuakerBooks

QuakerBooks of FGC, the Quaker bookstore run by Friends General Conference, has moved locations from the offices of FGC in Philadelphia, Pa., to the bookstore at Pendle Hill study center in Wallingford, Pa. Operations in the new space began on Monday, April 13, and are continuing there for at least the next six months in an experimental collaboration between the two organizations.

With this move, Pendle Hill’s small bookstore has grown to include in excess of a thousand new titles to serve over 4,500 annual campus visitors, and QuakerBooks is expanding its access through the walk-in space, ample parking, and foot traffic of Pendle Hill.

“By having one bookstore serving our two institutions, we hope to offer a better and stronger service for everyone,” said Barry Crossno, general secretary of FGC, in the latest edition of Book Musings, the enewsletter of QuakerBooks.

The new hours of the bookstore are 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Thursday through Monday. The phone numbers remain the same, 800-966-4556 (toll-free) or 215-561-1700 ext. 3044 (local). The QuakerBooks website (quakerbooks.org) will continue to be available 24/7.

Crowdfunding campaign for supporting ministry underway

At the end of March, Releasing Ministry Alliance, a group whose purpose is to support Spirit-led service among the Religious Society of Friends and beyond, announced a spring campaign to publicize and raise funds for its main project, a website dedicated to helping others share about and crowdfund their ministries. The campaign aims to raise $16,000.

“It feels right to run a crowdfunding campaign to fund the development of a crowdfunding platform,” says RMA co-founder Viv Hawkins of Central Philadelphia (Pa.) Meeting.

Funds are needed to develop the web application, establish a nonprofit organization, and fund start-up operations. The end result will be “an online platform to publicize Spirit-led services (ministries) and provide channels for various types of support for participating ministries,” as stated on the alliance’s website.

Both co-founders of the project, Hawkins and Vonn New of Bulls Head-Oswego Meeting in Clinton Corners, N.Y., have experienced the practical difficulties of maintaining a livelihood while spending significant time and energy in ministry among Friends. New explained, “Understanding that we are not alone with these challenges, we decided to use our skills to solve these problems.”

Friends Journal readers may remember first hearing about the project in the March 2014 issue on Funding Ministry; New and Hawkins were the authors of an article titled “Releasing Friends,” in which they introduced the problem of funding ministry and shared their own stories.

An informational website is available at releasingministry.org. The enhanced website will add information about participating ministries: descriptions, testimonials, and accountability reports, and contact information to invite the ministry and channels to donate money and other forms of support to the ministries. A network of people will receive informational emails to supplement the website.

The campaign has been funded in part by the Lyman Fund. The project has minutes of support from Central Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill, Frankford, Germantown, and Greene Street meetings and Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting.

Quaker student film festival results

bffOn April 6, the Bridge Film Festival, an international festival of student-made films from Friends schools and meetings worldwide that is dedicated to showcasing films that depict Quaker values in action, shared the results and judges’ choice awards of its sixteenth annual event via an animated video on the festival’s YouTube channel (youtube.com/user/BridgeFilmFestival).

This year there were 25 entries total from 13 schools, including Bootham School, Brooklyn Friends School, Carolina Friends School, Frankford Friends School, Friends School of Baltimore, George School, Leighton Park School, Moses Brown School, Oakwood Friends School, Olney Friends School, Sidcot School, Tandem Friends School, and William Penn Charter School.

The festival has four main categories: Documentary, Narrative, Public Service Announcement (PSA), and New Media. Each of these categories wins a judges’ choice award. The judges evaluate each entry based on five criteria: communication skill, creativity, technical quality, Quaker relevancy, and originality. The judges this year were Christen Higgins Clougherty, Pat Schall, Linda Shockley, and Gail Walker.

In the video, a judges’ choice award was announced for each category. For Documentary, the winner was “GLOW: The Importance of GSAs” from Carolina Friends School; for Narrative, “The Pancake Revolution” from Olney Friends School; for PSA, “Anti Cyber Bullying Campaign” from Bootham School; and for New Media, “Sustain” from Brooklyn Friends School.

Lastly, the coveted Spirit of the Festival award is given out by the Executive Committee of the festival, and goes to a film that the committee thinks best exemplifies the spirit of the festival. This year, the award went to “Mommy’s Little Boy” from George School. The Executive Committee is made up of five members: Catherine Clark, Andrew Swartley Cohen, Rachel Mazor, Tica Vreeland, and Laurence Williams.

The Bridge Film Festival is supported by Brooklyn Friends School (where the festival originated in 2000) and Friends Council on Education, the umbrella organization for Quaker schools across America. Learn more about the festival at bridgefilmfestival.org.

Appointment

wessOn April 7, Guilford College, a Quaker liberal arts school in Greensboro, N.C., announced the appointment of C. Wess Daniels as the William R. Rogers Director of Friends Center and Quaker Studies, succeeding Max Carter, who will retire this summer after 25 years at Guilford.

Daniels has been a full-time Quaker minister, educator, researcher, and public theologian, and has been working toward cultivating renewal among all branches of the Religious Society of Friends. For the past five and a half years, he has served as Quaker pastor at Camas (Wash.) Friends Church, a programmed meeting in Northwest Yearly Meeting.

As a doctoral student at Fuller Theological Seminary in California, he researched the renewal of the Quaker tradition within a contemporary context. He created a model of renewal for use by Quakers and all faith traditions and, in July 2014, received his PhD from Fuller’s School of Intercultural Studies.

“With his skills and experience and a commitment to Quaker renewal and participatory culture, it is my strong belief that Wess is the right person at the right time to fill the leadership role as our William R. Rogers Director of Friends Center and Quaker Studies,” said Jane K. Fernandes, president of Guilford. “I am very pleased that we have reached a successful conclusion to the search for this essential position helping to assure that the Quaker ethos remains a vital force on campus.”

Daniels has diverse teaching experience, including graduate-level classes for the past three years at George Fox Evangelical Seminary (Oregon) and Earlham School of Religion (Indiana). He is the author of five books, including A Convergent Model of Renewal: Remixing the Quaker Tradition in a Participatory Culture, which was published this year.

Established in 1982 during the presidency of William R. Rogers, Friends Center connects Guilford to the wider Quaker community and reaffirms the college’s leadership role in Quaker higher education. The college announced in February that an anonymous donor has endowed the director’s position, which Carter has held since 1990.

 

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