Peace and Social Concerns Committee, 10/24/16

Present: Dan G, Ka R, Jane J, Connie B, Roger C, George M, Beth A.

We expressed gratitude to Dan for agreeing to be our Committee Clerk for the year.

Letter writing in November: Jane suggested writing to the President-Elect with our suggestions for her/his term. Jane will take overall responsibility and will be assisted by others of us. Roger is laying down the responsibility for faxing the letters in, since many fax numbers are now unavailable. Henceforth the person running the letter writing will take charge of getting them to the recipients. Jane reminds us that FCNL suggests we send in our opinions to the local papers. Sandi Albertson Shea did so recently and her letter was published in the Gazette. Roger will send to our committee the URL with instructions for letter writing. We will try having Friends do their letters on computers if they wish, for the sake of recipients that do not list fax numbers and prefer forms or email for this purpose. Please bring in portable computers for this experiment and have them connected to the internet and to the form, or email, of the intended recipient, when letter writing begins on Nov 20.

Refugees: Ka has persevered in getting connected to the group PVRAG working out arrangements for the 51 refugees coming to Northampton. She gave us an overview of the efforts to help the refugees and of places where Friends can connect if they want to get involved. It may be that there would be a way for one of MtToby’s contributions (perhaps the Festival of Giving) to donate for the work. Ka may also be able to look into this possibility.

The film “Voices Across the Divide,” will be shown by P&SC on Friday November 11 at MtToby. Scott R will come down from northern Vermont to guide the discussion after the 1 hour film.

We decided to hold our committee meetings on the third Monday from now on, starting on November 21.

Beth told of a talk by Pat Hynes about the part the military plays in climate change, and also of a project to plant 10,000 trees in Vietnam. These two talks might be combined somehow and Beth will talk further with Pat about it.

Beth suggested that our spring 11:40 hour (date? Dan knows) could be devoted to forests and their role in climate mitigation.

We closed with a time of silence.