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Peace and Social Concerns Annual Report - 2000The current membership of the Penn Valley Peace and Social Concerns Committee was convened in early January, 2000. We have drawn strength and inspiration from the Quaker tradition of social activism. We feel it is imperative to respect the sovereignty of communities where we are active and to utilize sensitivity and listening skills to better understand how we can assist them when invited to do so. To that end we are acting on a suggestion from Margery Larrabee with Traveling Ministries to contact Patience Schenk of the Annapolis Monthly Meeting for material on shaping the process of our peace work.Our first request to our meeting was to help a young Wisconsin Quaker named Ian Fritz. He solicited our support for his trip to the World Bank/I.M.F. conference in Washington. Ian expressed concern over the organization's apparent disregard for local cultural, economic and environmental issues. We have reestablished an active relationship with Westport Cooperative Services, a community based organization representing 19 churches who collectively operate a diversity of social programs in the central KC area. Our meeting recently sponsored five children in their Back to School program. We regularly attend Board Meetings to continue to learn how to best serve the community through this organization. The KC Star publishes a Biblical quotation six days a week in its editorial section. One of our ongoing projects has been to contact the newspaper and other communities of faith in an effort to persuade the paper to include other religious texts as well. Our belief is that a diverse representation of religious quotations will help to foster greater understanding, respect and kinship among diverse communities. Curbside recycling is a much needed program that sadly has yet to come to many communities in the Kansas City area. Consequently we have recently offered to process the recycling of our meeting; whether there is a demand for this program remains to be seen. We intend to support the recycling proposal on the ballot in upcoming elections. In an effort to keep the meeting abreast of volunteer opportu- nities we include the volunteer needs of appropriate commu- nity organizations in our monthly report during meeting for Worship with Attention to Business. And finally, Move-Up is a community organization comprised of clergy and citizens who are focused on improving condi- tions in one of Kansas City's most criminally active neighborhoods, 39 and Prospect. Our committee is encouraging Friends to support Move-Up and participate in upcoming vigils whenever possible. —David Rommel, Clerk, Peace & Social Concerns Committee |