Canadian Friends Service Committee
CFSC is the peace and social justice agency of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Canada. Website: quakerservice.ca.
- Canadian Friends Service Committee April 2021
Canadian Friends Service Committee (CFSC)’s office remains closed due to the pandemic, and staff have been working from home since March 2020. Nonetheless, the work continues. CFSC now offers more virtual events, including hosting various film screenings, workshops, and a weekly meeting for worship.
This year marks CFSC’s ninetieth anniversary. To celebrate a new website has been created with pictures, videos, and stories: 90years.quakerservice.ca. Once a month all year long, CFSC will be hosting a series called Get to Know Thee, Friend. Each event offers the chance to hear personal stories about Quakerism and service work from one Friend who has made a major contribution to CFSC.
To help build community and spread peace skills, CFSC continues to offer the six-week-long virtual Are We Done Fighting? workshop series. It features facilitated group activities and one-on-one discussions in breakout rooms. More than 100 people have participated so far.
CFSC is also working to support the passage of Bill C-15, which repudiates all racist doctrines of superiority and rejects colonialism. It would provide a long-overdue framework for the government of Canada to work cooperatively with Indigenous peoples to implement the rights affirmed in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in both law and policy.
Learn more: CFSC
Continue reading → - Canadian Friends Service Committee October 2020
Canadian Friends Service Committee’s (CFSC) work has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, for the first time in two decades CFSC wasn’t at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues that was scheduled for April—because it was canceled. Although the CFSC office is closed, staff are able to do most of the same work virtually, and in some cases moving to Zoom has even allowed for a broader geographic diversity of participants.
Staff have started offering a free six-week-long peace skills workshop series allowing group members to learn from each other using several chapters of CFSC’s award-winning 2019 book Are We Done Fighting? Building Understanding in a World of Hate and Division as a basis for conversation. There are also facilitated group activities and one-on-one discussions in breakout rooms. The series is scheduled based on each group’s availability; registration information is available on the website.
In response to the killing of unarmed Black and Indigenous people in the United States and Canada, CFSC created another free series of workshops that help participants study and learn about systemic racism, particularly as it relates to the criminal justice system. This series started in September and includes a number of external experts helping to advise and shape the discussions.
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