In the Octo­ber issue, fre­quent Friends Jour­nal con­trib­u­tor Carl Blu­men­thal inter­views Nic­hole Net­tle­ton, of New York Year­ly Meet­ing’s Dif­fer­ent Abled Friends and Allies (DAFA). Prob­a­bly my favorite part is when Nic­hole tells the sto­ry of look­ing for sup­port and con­tact­ing DAFA only to real­ize is was­n’t active any­more. Unde­terred, she took mat­ters into her own hands:

Since I saw it as a major need and I had a lot of expe­ri­ence with dis­abil­i­ties, I thought I could help by set­ting up week­ly Zoom meet­ings.… We start­ed about a year ago, and though I don’t know much about facil­i­tat­ing or the tech­nol­o­gy involved, I’m learn­ing as I go. Some­times you just have to start things when the need is there. You can’t be afraid that you don’t know enough or think you’re good enough to lead.

Carl has been work­ing on issues of phys­i­cal dis­abil­i­ties and men­tal health for decades and he’s been a friend­ly advo­cate to get us to pub­lish more on the sub­ject. Last year he wrote the land­mark Quak­ers and Men­tal Health­care for us. I cer­tain­ly learned a lot about Quak­er involve­ment in the field. This after­noon I inter­viewed Carl for our author chat YouTube series.

Speak­ing of FAQs that I hope will attract search engine queries for quite some time, Emi­ly Provance has been on fire with a series she calls “answers for a small‑f friend,” in which she — well, answers a lot of ques­tions peo­ple might have. Many of these are just as use­ful for us large‑F Friends and they’re all worth check­ing out.

This week’s is “Is there any­thing all Quak­ers have in com­mon?” She gets around the sometimes-confoundingly diverse set of opin­ions among Friends by find­ing com­mon­al­i­ties that “near­ly all Friends” would agree with. It’s a good way to proceed.

The most antic­i­pat­ed new release this Fri­day ¹ is a new video from Quak­er­S­peak: What to Expect at a Quak­er Memo­r­i­al Ser­vice.

These ensem­ble Quak­er­S­peaks are like FAQs sent out to the search engines. They’re edu­ca­tion­al to watch when they come out: I sit there imag­in­ing what I would be say­ing if the cam­era was on me. But the real ben­e­fit is months and years from now when non-Quaker who has nev­er walked into a meet­ing­house is faced with hav­ing to attend a memo­r­i­al ser­vice for a beloved neigh­bor, or rel­a­tive, or co-worker. They will nat­u­ral­ly turn to their favorite search engine and find this video on YouTube. Six and half min­utes lat­er they’ll know what they’re get­ting into. Maybe they’ll stick around and click on relat­ed videos like “What to Expect in Quak­er Meet­ing for Wor­ship.”

I’m biased, cer­tain­ly, but I think Friends do wed­dings and funer­als par­tic­u­lar­ly well. Many peo­ple first expe­ri­ence Friends through these ser­vice. I know I always leave know­ing so much more about some­one who I assumed I already knew;; I some­times feel a pang of regret at not hav­ing tak­en the time to dis­cov­er their oth­er inter­ests while they were alive.

What to Expect at a Quak­er Memo­r­i­al Service