"We prepare students to engage in the world that is and to help bring about a world that ought to be."
Peace Week
February 4 - 8, 2019
Peace Week 2019 at Friends willl launch an in-depth look at “Justice and Mercy: Transforming Conflict into Connection.” Conflicts can fracture human relationships. Left unaddressed, conflicts can evolve into injustice. As a result, harm will multiply and peace will be diminished. Without justice, there can be no peace. And without mercy, relationships grounded in justice will not last. The Quaker testimony of Peace calls us to consider how we might address conflict and harm more restoratively. How might we balance the need for justice and accountability with the need for mercy and forgiveness? What does peacemaking look like when justice and mercy are both at the center? We will consider these queries and how they apply to each level of human relationship: the individual, interpersonal, communal, and societal. Following Peace Week, the community will have the opportunity to continue engaging with this topic through partnerships with community leaders and outside organizations.
Monday, February 4, 2019
- Middle School Meeting for Worship
This programmed Meeting for Worship will use queries to prompt reflection on justice and mercy and transforming conflict into connection. - Upper School Advisory Activity
After watching Bryan Stevenson’s TED talk, “We need to talk about an injustice,” on prisons as a unjust and merciless response to conflict, Upper School students and advisors will reflect and discuss using a few queries. - Full Faculty and Staff Meeting for Worship
Queries to guide our silent reflection will be provided.
Tuesday, February 5, 2019
- Upper School Meeting for Worship
This programmed Meeting for Worship will use queries to prompt reflection on justice and mercy and transforming conflict into connection. Participants will be asked to consider how prison proliferation, mass incarceration, and the second-class status of people formerly incarcerated thwart efforts to establish a society grounded in peace.
- Lower School Meeting for Worship
This programmed Meeting for Worship will use queries to prompt reflection on justice and mercy and transforming conflict into connection. - Upper School Assembly - The Kalief Browder Story
In the popular imagination, prisons resolve conflict, yet, in reality, they exacerbate it. Activist Akeem Browder, who leads the Campaign to Shut Down Rikers, will share his family story of incarceration, to illuminate the injustice of the prison industrial complex and the need for just and merciful alternatives. Akeem founded the Kalief Browder Foundation as a response to his brother’s suicide triggered by years of abuse at Rikers. This personal story will put a human face on the impact of prisons on incarcerated people and the communities they eventually rejoin. Parent/guardians interested in joining the session may sit in the balcony. - Middle School Assembly & Lower School Community Period
In both sessions, we will be joined by KK Peabody, a certified mediator and restorative circle-keeper, who will help us explore conflict and harm as opportunities to establish more peaceful relationships with others. We will gain useful tools, including feeling words, action steps, and an upstander mindset. We will discuss what happens when conflict and harm is left unaddressed or is tackled in unproductive ways. Through extension activities in classrooms and advisories/homerooms, students will put into practice tools for conflict transformation and peacemaking. Parent/guardians interested in joining the session may sit in the balcony.
Thursday, February 7, 2019
- Upper School Lunch Discussion
Akeem Browder will return for a follow-up discussion on the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration, and restorative practices aimed at interrupting the proliferation of prisons. He will be joined by a few of his colleagues in the social work, youth empowerment, and anti-criminalization fields.
Friday, February 8, 2019
- Middle School Homeroom/Advisory Activity
This activity will give Middle Schoolers an opportunity to put into practice tools for conflict transformation and peacemaking. - A Virtual Reality Experience l The Shu
Upper School students and adult members of our community are invited to interact with this immersive, haunting virtual tour of solitary confinement, simulating both the physical environment and the psychological disorientation of prolonged isolation. The installation will be located in the Meetinghouse lobby. Following the experience, participants are invited to use the Quaker practice of silence to reflect and consider the testimony of peace and its connections to justice and mercy. The student Service Committee will host an advocacy table with informational materials on ways to get involved; including a call for Governor Cuomo to sign the HALT ACT, S.1623. All US students, faculty, staff and parents across the three divisions are welcome to visit the installation and participate. Due to the nature of the exhibit and its content, students in the MS and LS divisions are not invited.
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Friends Seminary — the oldest continuously operated, coeducational school in NYC — serves college-bound day students in Kindergarten-Grade 12.
