Prerequisites to Building a Hub for Local Resilience

[Note: This is a continuation of a series I’ve been writing about resilience based on THE RESILIENCE WE WANT, A Guide to Making Your Community Space into a Hub for Local Resilience and Mutual Aid.]

Before getting more into the details of the guide to make your community a hub for resilience, I’d like to express more fully why I think it is important to do this work now.

I’m distressed by the spiritual poverty I sense today. And why Quakers aren’t more active in sharing our spirituality and spiritual practices with the wider community. Instead, we see our numbers dwindling and find ourselves increasingly isolated. We continue to have very little diversity in the Quaker meetings I’m familiar with.

This is not consistent with Quaker communities in the past.

• Is this isolation because fewer people in our society are looking for the spiritual resources and practices Quakers have to offer?
  • I believe everyone yearns for a spiritual life, whatever that means for a given person.
  • They might not know what that looks like or how to find it.
• Are Quaker spiritual practices not what they are looking for?
• What does the lack of diversity in Quaker meetings mean?
  • Why don’t Black, Indigenous, and other people of color choose to join our meeting communities?
• Do those outside our meetings see a lack of spiritual integrity? That we are not practicing what we preach?
• Are we being held accountable for:
  • Quakers’ roles in the institution of slavery?
  • With the institutions of forced assimilation of native children?
  • For being too complicit in White supremacy and institutional racism today?
  • For not working aggressively against environmental devastation?
    • Against fossil fuel use and infrastructure?
      • Against building new pipelines?
      • Against the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives?
    • Against false solutions such as carbon capture?
  • For not standing against this country’s militarism and empire?
  • For not working for the abolition of police and prisons?
  • For not standing against hierarchies throughout our society?
    • Hierarchies set up power dynamics that lead to oppression.
    • This is why Mutual Aid is fundamental to building resilient communities.
• I rarely see Quakers at justice actions in the community.
• I rarely see Quakers take risks to agitate for justice.
• Do Quakers fail to see not only our history of settler colonialism but that we are settlers now?
  • What does land back mean for our properties and ways of relating to the land?
  • What does this mean for our relationships with Indigenous peoples?
• Are Quakers uncomfortable with the changing demographics and/or social changes in the wider society?
  • Which changes?
  • Why?
• Do we do what we are led to do?

It is implicit in these questions that these are things I am led to believe Quakers should be doing now.

This relates to the creation of local hubs for resilience because:

• Quakers need to answer these questions for ourselves as we re-engage with our neighbors.
  • For they will be asked of us. If not directly, implicitly.
• It is this re-engagement that could help re-invigorate our Quaker meetings. I believe it’s the only way that can happen.

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