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June 8, 2025 To Friends Everywhere, Over the past five decades, Friends have become more and more welcoming of diversity in sexual orientation and gender identity. For example, in 1992, North Pacific Yearly Meeting (NPYM) found unity to say: “We find that the Spirit of God is present in all loving relationships, regardless of the genders of those involved. <...> Our love and support is for all persons and is not based on the gender of the person they love.” And in 2017, NPY

Clear Hearts has a booth at  Portland Pride Festival ! Saturday, July 20, 12:00 PM to 8:00 PMSunday, July 21, 11:30 AM to 6:00 PM (at Tom McCall Waterfront Park at Naito Parkway, between the Morrison Bridge and SW Ash Street in Portland) Please stop by and say hello! We will be at  Booth #171  on the central aisle, near the Information Tent and the Family Tent: If you want Some Stuff, we made a brochure (available as a PDF) and we will be handing out stickers!

Lewis Steller created this zine to explore the ways that the traditional Quaker understanding of "Holding in the Light," a spiritual practice related to intercessory prayer, can be expanded to allow a broader range of understandings of how the Divine or Spirit can support us. This expansion can help reduce unnecessary pain that centuries of contrasting “good” light with “bad” dark can bring upon people who are racialized targets of white supremacy culture. "I'm Holding You in

Adopted by unanimous consensus at Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business on December 3, 2023 In November 2020, a sweeping super-majority of 82% of Portland voters approved a measure authorizing the creation of a new police oversight system to investigate and respond to police misconduct. A new oversight board and City department will replace the existing Independent Police Review.  A Police Accountability Commission (PAC) worked from December 2021 to August 2023 to de

Adopted by unanimous consensus at Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business on June 4, 2023 US society is addicted to surveillance and punishment, and our police and prisons are their institutional embodiment. They channel the human need for safety into racist fear and disgust, and use that excuse to control and destroy Indigenous, Black and brown people and communities. By any objective measure, police and prisons fail to “serve and protect” these communities. Because

Each traditional Quaker testimony – simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship of resources and the Earth – compels us as Quakers in North America to understand and acknowledge all of the ways that we have participated in and benefitted from the dispossession of Indigenous lands and destruction of Indigenous cultures. In the past and in the present, by things we have done and left undone, we have embraced violence against the Indigenous nations who had

We have had a couple of months of returning to in-person worship with the pandemic easing, but we have had full Zoom rooms and fairly sparse in-person attendance! Rather than continuing to pay rent for so few people to use the space, we discerned in business meeting that we are going to stick to Zoom for now (we can revisit this later in the year), and will include monthly in-person potlucks for some lovely in-person time with each other. Hope to see you online for Sunday m

Shared this in the meeting on the 30th, and also wanted to see whether others might be interested as well in reading and discussing together “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transformative Justice” by Mariame Kaba. This is a book I’ve been wanting to read and feel that it’s a good one to read in community. Here’s the link to the publisher’s site: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1664-we-do-this-til-we-free-us If you’re interested, please comment be

"There is nothing more 'real' about worship than actively engaging with the world and one's neighbors as they are, instead of as one wishes they might be."