Chicago plants a seed of peace
Chicago. The city’s always been kind of an enigma to me. It’s somewhere between rural Indiana and cosmopolitan Manhattan in my imagination. Each time I visit, it’s a discovery of new layers. Now, the discovery of new stratum is beginning to form a coherent, and exciting kind of geology.
Six months ago, our friends at the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation of Evanston invited us to attend the Hamsa Festival with them. Hamsa is a middle-eastern cultural fair, and the JRC wanted to use the event to reach out to other communities of faith in Chicago. I arrived late Friday night to attend the two-day festival. Elaine Waxman (chief ambassador for our efforts with the JRC) picked me up and whisked me to her home, through the last bits of rain from an unusually strong summer storm.
Our work began Saturday morning, as we arrived in time to set up our booth before the noon festival opening. As I carried boxes of coffee over the wet grass of Lincoln Park, I met Miryam Rashid, who works with the American Friends Service Committee, and who was sharing our booth. Miryam coordinates AFSC’s efforts to build a market for Fair Trade Palestinian olive oil, another project which illustrates of the need for economic development in support of people building sustainable livelihoods as a foundation for peace. What a perfect pairing! I thought to myself, as we began to converse with festival attendees…two examples of how fair trade can connect us to peacemaking around the world!
Through the course of the weekend we met a diverse cross-section of Chicago’s community: young and old, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, religious and agnostic. The organizers of the Hamsa Festival certainly succeeded in building a large tent where everyone felt welcome. Conversations flowed, packages sold, and through the course of the two days, we met a handful of dedicated community activists and organizers who are interested in helping us spread the story of delicious peace.
My hope from the weekend? That we would begin to map out the landscape of interfaith collaboration in Chicago, and plant the seeds for a city-wide interfaith campaign modeled after our efforts in San Francisco. We certainly made a number of these connections, and as we packed up the booth on Sunday night, I thought of the farmers in Uganda, and how the story of their work is slowly spreading from place to place, echoing other efforts to build peace, and inspiring new ones. That distant view I once had of Chicago is starting to come into focus, the landscape of interfaith organizing is starting to come together around this project.
Monday morning I met with the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core, an incredible organization, and powerful center of gravity for the emerging interfaith youth movement. As our work with farmers to build a fair trade movement progresses, we find ourselves walking alongside other efforts. Connected by shared values, we find our paths intersecting. The IFYC is one of those new partners, and I look forward to sharing news from their upcoming national conference, where we’ll be presenting a workshop on fair trade, faith, and interfaith action.
If any of you, our dear readers, have suggestions for likely partners in Chicago, please send them our way.
Stay tuned…