Quaker Life

My father introduced me to Quakerism in 1994 when he and I started attending Germantown Monthly Meeting in Philadelphia. The Meeting quickly became my spiritual home and remains so to this day. My father joined the Meeting in 1996, and I did the same in 2000.

We started going to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Annual Sessions in the late 1990s, and in 2000, we went to our first Friends General Conference (FGC) Gathering, held that year in Rochester, New York. After skipping the 2001 FGC Gathering, I had not missed a Gathering until 2011, when I was at Pendle Hill for seven weeks during the summer. While attending the Gathering year after year, I built tight friendships and helped to form a community in my age group. I look forward to the Gathering each year and hope to go often in the coming years.

When I was in sixth grade, I became involved in the Middle School Friends program of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and I entered the Young Friends program in 2004. Two years later, I took a leadership position in Young Friends when I became a Permanent Nurturer for that body. I served in that capacity until August of 2009. At the 2007 FGC Gathering in River Falls, Wisconsin, I was one of the Clerks of the High School Program. Three years later, I was the Presiding Co-clerk for the Adult Young Friends Program at the 2010 FGC Gathering in Bowling Green, Ohio.

In the summer of 2008, the second Young Peoples Empowerment Convergence (YPEC) was held in West Philadelphia. I attended the first YPEC in 2007 and helped to plan the second. These gatherings grew out of PYM’s Young Friends group. Their goal was to demonstrate the significance of youth in our society and to expose young people’s untapped potential to effect positive change.

After the first YPEC, I wrote an article about the workshops and activities that were held. My article was published in the October 2007 issue of Friends Journal, a national Quaker magazine that has a readership of 25,000. I also administered YPEC's website for two years. I have since written several other articles for Friends Journal and interned at their Philadelphia offices in the summer of 2009.

During the second half of my senior year of high school, I attended the Woolman Semester in Nevada City, California. The Woolman Semester is an academically rigorous program that incorporates the Quaker values of peace, social justice, and environmental sustainability into one semester of high school. Attending Woolman was a continuation of my spiritual journey, and I carry the experiences I had while there with me in my daily life.

At Haverford College, I live in Quaker House, an on-campus apartment that is at the center of Quaker student life. The twelve of us in Quaker House strive to live intentionally. We host three communal meals each week, to which we invite students from across campus.

Since January 2011, I have also served as the Co-clerk of QuaC, Haverford's Quaker student group. Quaker House and QuaC host an unprogramed student Meeting for Worship each Sunday when school is in session. QuaC hosts on- and off-campus retreats and other events to bring Quaker and Quaker-minded students together.

QuaC’s Intervisitation Committee fosters relationship-building among students at Quaker-rooted colleges and universities. During the time I have been at Haverford, the Intervisitation Committee has organized weekend trips to Earlham and Guilford Colleges, as well as to George Fox University. We have brought students from those institutions to Haverford for weekend visits, as well. These trips have proven to be eye-opening, as we get to know people from different schools and dialogue about what it means to be Quaker.

This past summer, I was a participant in the Young Adult Leadership Development Program at Pendle Hill, a Quaker study center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. During the seven-week program, the ten of us, who came to Pendle Hill from across the country and around the world, took classes in Quakerism, finding our inner voice, and theater. We also did service work at Pendle Hill and volunteered at community organizations in Philadelphia.