(Concord Friends Meeting - Meetinghouse Garden)
"Our gracious Creator cares and provides for all his creatures. His tender mercies are over all his works; and so far as his love influences our minds, so far we become interested in his workmanship and feel a desire to take hold of every opportunity to lessen the distresses of the afflicted and increase the happiness of the creation. Here we have a prospect of one common interest from which our own is inseparable that to turn all the treasures we possess into the channel of universal love becomes the business of our lives."
—John Woolman: “A plea for the poor,” (written in 1763-4) in The journal and major essays, ed. Phillips P. Moulton, 1971, p. 241.
Recent:
The daily worship offered by Friends House Moscow has compiled a short list from suggestions by their attendees.
A lecture on the history of Ukraine can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv4sMHarOvQ [1]
Reading List
see Facebook links below to obtain Zoom links
Worldwide, Friends have been making Zoom meetings publically available. Generally the purposes are to support peaceful actions by the conflicting parties, hold all who are suffering in the Light, and uphold one another in our own emotional upheaval and personal application of the Peace testimony. All of the meetings I have attended have been unprogrammed in format, and had extended post-worship discussions.
From Kathi C: I have created a new personal bank account for the sole purpose of supporting donations to overseas accounts. It has been tested, and a transaction confirmed end-to-end from here to Poland. If anyone would like to make a donation to the overseas bank account of a charity, I am willing to facilitate this or advise how to set it all up. (It is fairly easy to find a calculator online to show APPROXIMATELY how your US dollars will be exchanged.)
Friends World Committee for Consulatation (FWCC) - Europe and Middle East Section (EMES) have published this link to information about how to donate to Quaker work supporting Ukrainian refugees:
https://fwccemes.org/news/quaker-support-for-ukraine [2]
This includes examples of how money might be spent by Quakers in Estonia, Georgia, Hungary and Poland.
(Gerard Guiton [3], a Quaker author of note in Australia, is sponsoring Bialystok in this.)
Facebook is the best source to find meeting invitations and projects. Posts have the most recent information for worship meetings, discussions, donation opportunities, and safety updates of Friends still in the conflict zone. Sponsoring meetings and organizations invite the public to their online meetings by posting Zoom links with no need to pre-register or obtain a separate password. So far all of the meetings have either been in English or there was good ongoing interpretation.
Not a Facebook user? In some cases these groups also have web sites - use a browser search engine to search by the same name as listed below.
Here's a list of FB account names, with hyperlinks to them, in order of frequency of relevent posts:
If you have a comment about this page, or have a potential item to add, please email WebClerk [at] concordfriendsmeeting [dot] org
Links:
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv4sMHarOvQ
[2] https://fwccemes.org/news/quaker-support-for-ukraine
[3] https://mellenpress.com/author/gerard-guiton/5774/
[4] https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Community/Kwakrzy-Quakers-Bia%C5%82ystok-Online-1679498318968030/
[5] https://www.facebook.com/Ukrainian-Refugee-Childrens-Fund-101892739144746
[6] https://fb.com/QuakersKyivUkraine
[7] https://www.facebook.com/FWCCEMES/
[8] https://www.facebook.com/FriendsHouseMoscow/
[9] https://www.facebook.com/fwccworldoffice/
[10] https://www.facebook.com/Quakers-in-Central-Europe-192044154266109/
[11] https://www.facebook.com/Quaker-Council-for-European-Affairs-QCEA-208820802584092/