WHO WE ARE
Friends Peace Teams is a Spirit-led organization that develops long-term relationships with communities in conflict around the world to work for justice and healing, and to create enduring cultures of peace.
WHO WE ARE
Friends Peace Teams is a Spirit-led organization that develops long-term relationships with communities in conflict around the world to work for justice, peace and healing, and to create enduring cultures of peace.
Friends Peace Teams builds on extensive Quaker experience combining practical and spiritual aspects of grassroots work for justice and peace. Everyone is welcome: justice and peace workers, ministers, collaborators, facilitators, volunteers, advisors, donors, subscribers, and friends.
WHERE WE WORK
We work with partners around the world
WHAT WE BELIEVE
That of God is in all life. Every person is good and capable. Love and conscience do not spring forth fully formed, they grow as we pay attention. Faith grows as we experiment with allowing Spirit to guide our daily lives. Justice and peace are possible!
WHAT WE DO
We rely on the power of the living Spirit to bring life, joy, peace, and justice among people who have suffered on all sides of oppression, violence, or war. Grounded in mutual discernment, we work together as equals to create peaceful, just societies.
…strive to live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars, and come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strife were. ~ George Fox (1651)
Practice-Based Workshops
An Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) workshop series for justice and peace workers covers Transforming Power, Trauma Healing, Liberation from Oppression, and Discerning a Consensus of Conscience. Interactive activities, rather than lectures or sermons, create an experience of community across diverse people, as well as practice the skills found necessary to do justice and peace work well over the long haul. AVP mini-workshops, organized around true stories of the Power of Goodness — nonviolence, healing, and action, spread the understanding that justice and peace are possible.
Human Development
Violence and stress erode cognitive and social skills. Higher order functioning becomes rigid and conforming, and social interactions become authoritarian and hierarchical. Peace Schools and Gardens create cultures of justice and peace with each other and with nature among preschool children, adults, and whole communities. Peace Libraries offer books, read aloud sessions, mediation, and developmental play that reconstitutes people’s capabilities to be flexible, creative, and innovative.
Justice and Peace Actions
Rooted in liberation and integrity, we seek right relationships with each other and the entire natural world with attention to healing historic, transgenerational oppression and trauma. We strive to distribute resources equitably through regenerative relationships and structures. Friends Peace Teams works at the grassroots, across civil and generational divides, integrating ecological and social justice and peace. We join nonviolent direct actions, with Transforming Power guiding our actions and witness.
