Friends Forward

Variety of Pastas
Tomato Basil Sauce
Alfredo Sauce
Vegetable Lasagna
Vegan and Gluten Free Pasta Primavera
Caesar Salad
Garden Salad
Garlic Bread
Tiramisu 

Lauren Brownlee is FCNL’s deputy general secretary and the leader of the organization’s Community and Culture team. In this role, she serves as staff clerk and partners with the general secretary on organizational leadership. She offers strategic guidance around FCNL living into its values, particularly as they relate to its Quaker identity and its anti-racism, anti-bias, justice, diversity, equity, and integrity commitments. She also offers strategic support to FCNL’s human resources and Friends Place on Capitol Hill.Lauren joined the FCNL staff after serving on FCNL’s General Committee beginning in 2017 and its Executive Committee from 2019-2022. She is a member of Bethesda Friends Meeting, Baltimore Yearly Meeting, and the DC Peace Team. She currently serves on the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)'s corporation and board and the steering committees of the Quaker Call to Action and Quakers for Peace in Palestine and Israel.

She co-clerks the Quaker Coalition for Uprooting Racist steering committee and the AFSC’s Community, Equity, and Justice Board Committee. Lauren earned her B.A. in Classical Civilization and Greek from Wellesley College and her M.A. in Global, International, and Comparative History from Georgetown University. She is also a graduate of the Friends Council on Education’s Institute for Engaging Leadership in Friends Schools. Lauren is an alumna of Sidwell Friends School and served there after college as assistant director of auxiliary programs and as a history teacher. Before coming to FCNL, Lauren was the upper school head at Carolina Friends School and, before that, the director of social action at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart.

Lauren tries to finish a book every week and run a marathon every year.

In Friends schools, well-designed meetings are an essential expression of thoughtful leadership. This workshop explores how to create meetings that are purposeful, inclusive, and engaging—spaces where participants actively contribute rather than passively receive information. Participants will learn practical strategies for designing focused agendas, facilitating meaningful collaboration, inviting diverse perspectives, and using silence and reflection to deepen discernment and decision-making. Grounded in Quaker values, this session will help leaders build meetings that respect people’s time, strengthen trust, and move teams forward with clarity, shared ownership, and renewed energy.

How do we create spaces where students can engage meaningfully across difference while staying grounded in shared values? This workshop explores a classroom model that integrates Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion principles with Quaker testimonies such as community, equality, and peace to foster thoughtful, respectful dialogue.

Participants will examine a lesson structure that empowers students to choose relevant, real-world topics, from immigration and global conflicts to AI and stress and engage them through inquiry, reflection, and discussion. The approach explicitly teaches and practices core civil discourse skills, including empathetic communication, critical thinking, openness to inquiry, and constructive disagreement.

At Westtown School many major discipline cases are heard by our student leader and adult Discipline Council. Outcomes and supports for the students who appear before DC are recommended to the Upper School Principal. We use Friends Decision Making practices for this work. We will share strategies we use to train students and adults to live into this important work. We welcome voices from other schools who use similar structures as well. Let's think together about the joys and challenges of this model.

In this workshop, participants will explore how art therapy theories and interventions reflect and intersect with Quaker values of resilience, authenticity, social justice, and activism, thereby promoting emotional development and the growth of critical consciousness in children.  Participants will learn the foundational alignment of art therapy and Quakerism, the presenter’s utilization of art therapy tools for building student resilience and social justice activism, how art therapy concepts and interventions are incorporated into daily Quaker school life and education, and how teachers and staff can utilize art to promote emotional and identity development in students.  Participants will be invited to engage in art making during this workshop to experience and practice the concepts presented.  

Modeling instruction is a powerful, research-backed approach to science education in middle and upper grades. Students in a modeling classroom are challenged to build, test, modify, and reason from models is a way that closely mimics practices within the scientific community. Though not developed with Quaker process in mind, modeling instruction relies on communal discernment, collaboration, consensus building, and reflections on process in ways that closely overlap with models for Quaker decision-making. This workshop will explore this overlap. Attendees will act as students in an abridged version of a classic modeling instruction lesson to get a feel for the approach. Then, we will reflect as a group on the ways Modeling Instruction relies on many of the same themes as Quaker decision-making. The group will also explore how to use Modeling Instruction to teach and/or reinforce norms for Quaker decision-making among students.

Since 2020, MFS’s three-day summer orientation for all new faculty and staff and our year-long induction program for classroom teachers have been led by peer teachers rather than administrators. In addition, the yearlong induction program only includes typical meetings and presentations for the first half of the year and then becomes a Professional Learning Community following the Critical Friends Group model. Participants in this session will be introduced to the structure of and rationale for these programs. They will then participate in a modified CFG discussion protocol in which they are asked to probe one or more dilemmas that the program leaders experience.  Both the form and the content of these discussions, therefore, will immerse participants in learning about the session’s topics.

Do you struggle to find the time and resources to fully transmit Quaker practices to your colleagues? Are you interested in learning more about best practices from your colleagues? Would you like to participate in an initial attempt to gather and publish those practices in a resources that could be used by every Quaker school? If you've answered affirmatively to these questions, please join us!

*This workshop will also be held Thursday, July 9 3:15-4:15PM (Workshop 3).*