Quaker Conversation #6: What is mine to do? Quaker journeys in AWPS (Asia West Pacific Section).AU

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Quaker Conversation #6: What is mine to do? Quaker journeys in AWPS (Asia West Pacific Section).

87 views•Dec 2, 2020


FWCC World Office

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In its role of providing connective tissue, FWCC has been offering a series of Quaker Conversation sessions to any Friends who want to listen and learn and contribute to concerns important to Friends, particularly during this time of grief and reflection and transformation of COVID-19. 


SESSION 6:

What is mine to do? Quaker journeys in AWPS (the Asia West Pacific Section). Jo Vallentine of Australia Yearly Meeting and Gerry Yokota of Japan Yearly Meeting speak to the title.


These two remarkable women have lots to say about how being a Quaker has affected their lives, calling them to their work and activism. “I have been determined to take my Quakerism with me wherever I have felt called” says Jo, referring in part to her 8 years in the Australian Senate. Gerry will talk about being a Quaker in Japan and the importance of Quaker diversity, likening it to the spaces in music. Both women have lived into their Quakerism in inspiring ways. 


ABOUT GERRY

Gerry Yokota has been a member of Osaka Monthly Meeting, Japan Yearly Meeting since 1993. She grew up in a Southern Baptist church in the U.S. and became a Quaker as an adult. In her professional career teaching university English to undergraduates and cultural and literary theory to graduate students, she seeks to plant seeds of awareness of issues of social justice and climate justice through courses focusing on the SDGs.


ABOUT JO

Jo Vallentine – mother, grandmother, teacher, activist, accidental politician, serial offender, has been connected with Western Australia Regional Meeting since 1972.


Jo explored: Anti-nuclear campaigning accompanying motherhood, being led to contest a place in the Australian Senate in 1984 (against all odds, winning a seat), the accidental Senator (being a peoples’ representative through a Quaker lens, simultaneously creating community). Continuing with activism (including nonviolence pieces of training, Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects, committing holy obedience and landing in jail, round Australia Pilgrimage with Chernobyl survivors connecting with indigenous groups, helping to establish Alternatives to Violence Project in Western AustraliaCurrent contributions (Extinction Rebellion grandparents’ group, lobbying for de-militarisation which could fund all of U.N.s seventeen Sustainable Development goals).


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