Life and Power is a listening ministry seeking to discern a response to interpersonal violence that impacts Quaker communities. It is convened by Windy Cooler, a Public Friend from Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting in Baltimore Yearly Meeting. You can find our website here: https://www.lifeandpowerquakerdiscernmentonabuse.com/

The project has received material support in the past from the non-profit Odyssey Impact, which seeks to promote social justice through storytelling. That support allowed us to lead eight discussions of abuse in religious communities that centered around the educational film series Healing the Healers.

More recently Life and Power has found material support from the Obadiah Brown Benevolent Fund to create more of a media presence and provide educational materials to Friends through this media.

We are so grateful for this and for all the non-material ways in which Friends have sought to promote and expand this project. Partners in this have included the Quaker Leadership Center, who has hosted a consultation on abuse with our convener, and Friends General Conference, who has hosted a viewing and discussion of the film Women Talking with our convener, as well as Friends Journal who has worked consistently to help us raise the issue of interpersonal violence in Quaker community.

What we don't have and have never had is the material support we really need to make the listening part of the listening project really get off the ground. We have many more requests from Friends, survivors and others interested in giving testimony, than we can competently accept. This is because our listening sessions require about three hours of labor each time we engage with a Friend desiring to offer their testimony. We develop relationships, we listen carefully and tenderly, and we also offer a typed copy of each Friend's testimony to them in the end. Listeners volunteers for this project are not able to give up three hours of paid work very often. This has caused us to pause and reconsider how to support the ministry of listeners so we can responsibly support survivors and others wanting to give testimony.

There is no viable source of funding for this part of the Life and Power project except through personal fundraising. This is because there is no budget line item for this kind of work in our Quaker institutions. At least not that we have found in a year of asking.

With $2,000 we could document the testimony of 20 Friends who want to give testimony of this important issue. This testimony would form the foundation of discernment in our local meetings about how we are called to love.

Please consider a generous gift to Life and Power today.