🤩
ENJOY THE LATEST EPISODE OF OUR NEW SERIES, RISING UP FOR JUSTICE. Every Tuesday, Rising Up subscribers get the EXTENDED UNCUT version of the interview airing Mondays on Free Speech TV.
FEATURING JOYCE AJLOUNY - Our nation and our world is overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power.
👋🏽
CLICK HERE TO PRE-ORDER a SIGNED COPY of Sonali's new book
Breaking ICE: Community Self Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism. This week on Rising Up for Justice, Joyce Ajlouny, a Palestinian-American activist and social justice leader, joins us. For the past decade she has led the American Friends Service Committee as their General Secretary. The American Friends Service Committee - also known as AFSC - is a Quaker organization that has been working across the United States and around the world for over a century.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, I was so fascinated with the work that AFSC did when I first heard about it many years ago. As a young journalist, I've been following AFSC's work for many years, and it was my first exposure to a Quaker organization. Friends is a word that's very unique to that organization. Tell us, for people who've never heard of AFSC, or maybe have just heard of it but don't really know that much about it, what does it do? What are its main goals?
Joyce Ajlouny: Great. We are a 109-year-old Quaker peace and social justice organization, and we work to challenge systems of violence, of inequity, of exclusion, and oppression. We're grounded in that Quaker belief that there is that of God or the divine in every person, and so that every human being deserves dignity and respect and the opportunity to flourish. So AFSC works globally.
We have robust programming in the United States, but also globally in about 17 countries, and we work on a peace building agenda, migration justice, economic justice, and human rights.
So yes, the work has been ongoing for a long time, and it changed through the years. But it's really rooted in what our faith is calling us to do, which is to alleviate suffering, but also not to stop at suffering, but to look at the root causes and confront the systems that create and build the unjust systems around us.
