Friends Center
Friends Center is a hub for Quaker activity in Philadelphia and around the world. The Friends Center campus houses an active Quaker meeting; local, regional, and international Quaker organizations; and like-minded groups working for peace and justice. Website: friendscentercorp.org.
- Friends Center October 2024
Friends Center’s newest office tenant is Joyful Readers, a nonprofit that trains reading tutors for Philadelphia public school students. The addition of this tenant brings the building’s vacancy rate to less than 5 percent.
Among recent events onsite were Jewish Voice for Peace membership meetings to respond to Israel’s war in Gaza; and a talk by Emily Provance, from Fifteenth Street Meeting in New York City, on preventing election violence presented to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Friends.
Friends Center recently completed a “discovery study” with Partners for Sacred Places, a national nonprofit that brings people together to find creative ways to maintain and make the most of America’s older and historic houses of worship. The Friends Center complex includes the Race Street Meetinghouse, built in 1856.
The study assessed goals and strategies of Friends Center’s three equity partners—American Friends Service Committee, Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting—and how they relate to one another and to Friends Center.
The study will provide guidance to Friends Center following the significant changes made to both the campus and the nature of office work in the last four years. As the partners and Friends Center’s 25 nonprofit office tenants continue to adapt their office space for remote and hybrid work, the study will help inform Friends Center’s policies, programs, and physical plant in the next few years.
Continue reading → - Friends Center April 2024
Through the pandemic period, Friends Center’s nonprofit office space has maintained a vacancy rate of 7–10 percent, which is relatively low compared to most commercial office buildings in Center City Philadelphia. Three new organizations recently leased space at Friends Center: (1) Junior Achievement of Southeastern Pennsylvania, a nonprofit that inspires and prepares young people to succeed in a global economy; (2) Defender Association of Philadelphia, Local 5520 of the UAW, the employee union for public defenders in Philadelphia; (3) Womanist Working Collective, a radical grassroots social action and support collective for Black folks of marginalized gender experience (trans and cis), femmes, and other gender-expansive people.
With these additions, Friends Center has 30 organizations with space on site, including both Quaker organizations and non-Quaker nonprofits whose missions and values align with Quaker testimonies and values.
In addition, events in the shared conference and meeting space at Friends Center have included a convening of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s peace and social justice grantees; a “Sleep Out” fundraiser for Covenant House’s programs for homeless youth; Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia’s all-staff meetings; the program year kickoff for City Year and their associated AmeriCorps partner organizations; and the filming of one scene at a Quaker meeting for an upcoming episode of a new streaming TV series.
Continue reading → - Friends Center October 2022
Friends Center welcomed back Friends Publishing Corporation, publisher of Friends Journal magazine, the QuakerSpeak video series, and the outreach site Quaker.org, as a tenant, after more than two decades elsewhere. Providing office space to Friends Publishing is squarely in line with Friends Center’s mission to provide a strong Quaker presence in Center City Philadelphia, Pa., and to be a place of communal support for Friends organizations.
In addition, Friends Center’s work to build a new facility for Friends Child Care Center—founded on site over 40 years ago by staff of American Friends Service Committee and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting as well as members of Central Philadelphia Meeting—was scheduled to be complete by October. The new facility will enable the center to serve even more children with quality childcare in a convenient location with access to outdoor play space in the courtyard.
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Continue reading → - Friends Center April 2022
The Race Street meetinghouse at Friends Center in Philadelphia hosted a dedication on March 23 of an official state historical marker commemorating Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932). (The marker itself is installed at 1342 Arch Street.) The event was organized by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and Friends Select School in honor of Women’s History Month. According to the organizers, Dickinson was born into a Quaker family and attended Friends Select School and Westtown School. Dickinson was an abolitionist from an early age and had her first essay published in William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator when she was only 13. According to the organizers, “Dickinson became a nationally famous orator, speaking out for the rights of women, workers, and African Americans. In 1864, the 21-year-old Dickinson was the first woman to address the U.S. Congress, a speech attended by President Abraham Lincoln.” The event also marked the first major public collaboration between Friends Center and Friends Select School since the latter bought 1520 Race Street from Friends Center in 2021. The school is currently renovating the structure into a new building for its upper school STEAM curriculum (science, technology, engineering, arts, math). The school plans to open the STEAM building at the start of the 2022-23 school year.
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Continue reading → - Friends Center October 2021
Friends Center completed the sale of its building at 1520 Race Street to Friends Select School on August 3.
Most organizations with offices at Friends Center have continued largely to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic. Friends Center took the opportunity during the downtime to make two major improvements to the Race Street Room—the main worship room in the Race Street Meetinghouse.
First, the AV system was upgraded to simplify hosting hybrid meetings combining participants in person and participants online using videoconferencing software. As a result, in July, Central Philadelphia (Pa.) Meeting began holding meetings for worship on Sunday with an in-person option for the first time since March 2020. Attendance is typically about half in person and half online.
The second improvement was a change to Friends Center’s geothermal HVAC system that enabled it to provide modern air conditioning in the Race Street Room for the first time. (Historically the room had an early form of air cooling: Fires were lit in chimney pots during the summer. They were connected to a network of vents that created a breeze and drew hot air out of the space. However, that system was disabled in the first half of the twentieth century.) The air conditioning has made worshiping in the room possible even during recent hot spells.
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Continue reading → - Friends Center April 2021
In February, Friends Center in Center City Philadelphia, Pa., entered into an agreement with Friends Select School to renovate 1520 Race Street, a historic building on the west side of Friends Center’s courtyard. See the News column on page 30 for the full story and photos.
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Continue reading → - Friends Center October 2020
Since mid-March, Friends Center has operated with reduced hours and staffing as part of efforts to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. The equity partner and tenant organizations with offices on site have largely been working from home during that time. Building operations continued as an essential service, stewarding the property and receiving mail and shipments for tenants.
In July the Friends Child Care Center on site was able to reopen when Philadelphia moved to the “yellow” phase of Pennsyvlvania’s reopening plan, and thus to provide this much-needed service to parents.
Also in July, in the wake of the protests following George Floyd’s murder which included a period when the National Guard was deployed just two blocks away at City Hall, Friends Center placed two official “Black Lives Matter” banners on its east and north exterior fences. Unfortunately, one was removed within a day or two of being mounted. In response, a replacement was purchased and placed in Friends Center’s display window on North Fifteenth Street, where it remains.
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