Building Community with Likeminded Age-Mates: Emma Fee Testimonial

2023-2024 QVS Fellow Emma Fee shares a testimonial about her experience.

Towards the end of my undergraduate degree, I knew that the thing I loved most about my college experience would be the thing I would look for afterwards—a strong sense of community and belonging. I chose QVS as my first post-grad opportunity because intentional community is one of the core tenants of the program. I was raised in a tiny Quaker Meeting where oftentimes my siblings and I were the only people in attendance under the age of 30. Part of the reason I moved away from attending Meeting in high school and college was because I did not have a sense that there was a space for young Quakers, but I always knew that I would return to my Quaker roots once I had “grown up.” I didn’t know that there were other Quaker youth in the world, and that I could find a space of spiritual peers who were not many decades my senior.

“I have had my perspectives challenged and my worldviews broadened, in the most compelling and inviting space possible because I know that those with whom I share my time also share my most deeply held values.“

This sense of having a foundational understanding and an innate sense of belonging was crucial to me this year. While my friends and housemates in the program and I have had many disagreements about TV shows, restaurant choices, and how to load a dishwasher most effectively, there has never been a question of where any of us stand on human rights issues, on how to approach conflict and tough conversations, and on our mutual love and respect for one another as human beings.

Not having to dance around issues and find mild language to express our fiery worldviews of love and liberation has allowed us to dive into deeper conversations without preface. We all know that the core of Quaker practice is commitment to nonviolence, an understanding which has opened way for an ongoing conversation about the place of violence in movements resisting violent oppression. Our shared obligation to anti-racism has grown into conversations of bias and structural white supremacy in our places of work and worship, as well as into supporting one another through voicing our concerns and finding places of action and activity. I have had my perspectives challenged and my worldviews broadened, in the most compelling and inviting space possible because I know that those with whom I share my time also share my most deeply held values.

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What this means for me is that I am departing my QVS year with more unanswered questions than with which I first arrived, but more importantly, with the confidence that I can begin to unearth those answers by looking to my Quaker faith for guidance and direction. I have become surer than ever that that little voice in my most inner self, that which is not mine to claim but is the communal voice to which we all have access if we listen, is alive and well within me.

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