A Quaker Commitment to Reparative Justice

As an approach, a goal, an ideal, and an ethos, reparations provides a promising path towards healing, repair, and transformational social change. It addresses the dimensions of Spirit, relationship, and resources. As such, it offers a tool for Quakers and Quaker communities to understand our complicity in causing harm, and to explore our options for contributing to the repair of the harms of slavery and its afterlives, the penitentiary system, and settler colonialism, past and ongoing.

This workshop will share an actionable framework for understanding reparations, and the basic concepts and skills required for successful reparative action. Participants will learn about experiments of others, discuss your own thoughts, actions, and plans, and practice applying the framework.

We will examine the patterns of behaviour in Quaker meetings that may emerge around anti-racism initiatives, the beliefs that underlie these behaviours, and what stops us from taking collective action.

Through resources and an online discussion forum we will explore the issue of reparative justice and relational and financial reparations.

We will gather for four live Zoom sessions over a weekend, to witness where other Friends are in the process of making reparations, to learn from each other's struggles and learnings, and to support each other in discerning our next steps in individual and corporate reparative justice (full details of times can be found on the Woodbrooke website).