Postage stamps – Please Save and Bring to Meeting

Stamps are helping Right Sharing of World Resources

All stamps are welcome, inlcuding postage stamps that are new, old, foriegn, domestic, licked, and unlicked.

According to the RSWR website, “Since 1996, the Quaker Missions Stamp Project has collected and sold used postage stamps and used the proceeds to fund Quaker organizations like RSWR. Brad Hathaway founded the project and was its steward until 2009, when Earl Walker took over the stamp ministry. From 2009-2017, Earl raised over $11,000 for Right Sharing through the Quaker Missions Stamp Project. In 2017, Indianapolis First Friends Meeting became the new home for the stamp ministry. Amy Perry and Brad Jackson are the current co-coordinators.”

At the AFM meetinghouse, there is a bin marked “Stamps” near the classroom. Place your stamps in that bin and the stamps will be mailed to the following address. Also, you can also simply mail your stamps to the same address.

Stamps for Right Sharing
c/o Indianapolis First Friends
3030 Kessler Blvd. East Drive
Indianapolis, IN 46220

Realities of Developing Countries

Ann Riggs shared with us that since 2000 there has been a net outflow of funds from developing countries to developed counties, in the form of interest payments. See the United Nations Policy Brief No. 78 May 2020 to learn more. The developed countries being disproportionately populated by people of European descent, and the developing countries being disproportionately populated by Africans, Asians, and indigenous communities of the Americas, this reality is a contemporary form of global systemic racism. Whereas, RSWR’s model of partnership and of paying forward rather than paying back makes it a small, but effective part of the solution to this global challenge.
For Friends who have little awareness of the on-the-ground realities of life for the very many Friends in the world, Paul Thurow’s “The Last Hunger Season” (2013) is a good introduction. The journalist author misunderstood a little of what he was seeing. He doesn’t realize that the people he is reporting on live on subsistence farm land assigned to their family by the tribe, rather than land they purchased, for instance. But much of what he communicates is helpfully accurate.

 

Donations to support RSWR is also an option on their website.