Gratitude

My first set of gratitudes as convener is to those who trusted us enough to share their testimonies with us. I obviously cannot name you, but I will always carry your stories with me. I carry you, your face, your heart. I am grateful that you trusted all of us to try to carry you as you carry others.

Our listeners, always ready to be challenged and to grow and to care, were Lynette Davis, Kaia Jackson, Harold Page-Jamison, Trayce Peterson and Jade Rockwell. Sarah Allen contributed our guiding query in the first phone conversation we ever had. Margaret Webb helped to create the process that later became known as Coming Together for Continuing Revelation in her role as my supervisor during Supervised Ministry at Earlham School of Religion. In our attempt to be professional looking, Mandy Ford made us a stunning logo.

We received initial financial support through a fellowship I had with an interfaith NGO, Odyssey Impact, and when it looked like we simply didn’t have the Quaker-derived material resources to do the work we were called to do we received generous personal donations from Friends, including Sarah Allen, Betsy Bragg, Melinda Wenner Bradley, JT Dorr-Bremme, Rebecca Cromwell, Della Stanley-Green, Andy Stanton-Henry, Nikki Holland, Gail Koehler, Diana Rutherford, Emily Savin, Lori Pineiro Sinitsky, Lisa Smith, Elizabeth Terney, and Holly White. Thank you for coming to help in a very dark time.

I am grateful to QuakerSpeak for their excellent treatment of the project last year. I am also grateful to Judy Maurer for her full-length interview with me for Sierra Cascades Yearly Meeting’s newsletter that explained so well what the Life and Power project was doing and why.

You would not be reading this without the Friends General Conference and Quaker Leadership Center, especially their respective staff, Rashid Darden and Andy Stanton-Henry. Thank you both for publishing the common testimony and this accompanying letter.

Many thanks to the Obadiah Brown Benevolent Fund for funding some infrastructure improvements and a change of leadership and mission at Life and Power, which will follow the completion of the common testimony and for which I am very grateful.

It is with this that I feel released from my more than a decade-long ministry around interpersonal violence, at least in this form. My Prayer From Shame from 2012, when I was a survivor looking for a place in this world, has been answered, and my new prayer is that we all find that power to be present.

With life and power,

Windy Cooler

Embraced Public Minister, Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting (Baltimore Yearly)

Convener, Life and Power: Quaker Discernment on Abuse 2022-24