American Friends Service Committee 1501 Cherry Street Philadelphia, PA 19102 215/241-7000 FAX: 215/864-0104 Dulany 0. Bennett Chairperson Kara Newell Executive Secretary Minute of Appreciation for Warren Witte The Board of Directors of the American Friends Service Committee is grateful to Warren Witte for thirty four years of excellent work in an extraordinary variety of roles. Warren found his way to AFSC as a Milwaukee high school participant in a conference on "Individual Freedom and the Bill of Rights" which featured his baseball hero Jackie Robinson. During the years after he joined the staff as college and youth intern, then college secretary and program director, he visited campuses and organized service projects. His early experience was shaped by the McCarthy era, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. From Lame Deer to Hong Kong, Warren and Pat Witte led workcamps, shipped medical supplies and carried out other AFSC activities. He traveled widely for the Personnel Department, seeking candidates for complicated jobs. His own leadership gifts were recognized in his appointment as a young executive secretary in the North Central Region. Over seven energetic years in which patterns of work were reshaped to meet new opportunities and challenges, Warren was a vigorous participant in the life of the Service Committee, within his region and on the national scene. The Pacific Northwest was fortunate that he accepted a second assignment as a regional executive secretary during six years when wars in Central America, struggles for social and economic justice at home, and human rights every where demanded action. In 1984, Warren was persuaded to return to Philadelphia to take the lead in interpreting the Service Committee. Once again, he brought imagination and verve to a complex job where the sheer volume of work, the need for skilled negotiation and equanimity while fielding criticism would have daunted one less well prepared. At the same time, Warren was able to prompt AFSC's fresh attention to work with youth and strengthened connections with the wider Society of Friends. He has been central to the Committee's sustained effort to grapple with immigration policy as a matter of conscience for Friends. Celebrating 75 Years of Quaker Service An Affirmative Action Employer
-2- Through all of these endeavors, Warren has grown and helped others to grow in faith and courage. His creative imagination has sparked innovative program. He has helped AFSC to think, write and speak with integrity about struggles and accomplishments. Warren is known for his joyous laugh, as a tender friend and loyal colleague. This centered Friend's story is interwoven with that of the Service Committee over these many years. We are grateful for the sound fabric he has helped fashion and wish him Godspeed. November 1992
MEMORANDUM American Friends Service Committee, Inc. To: All Staff \. /) Date: March 13, 1978 From: Lou Schneider ~~ Subject: Warren Witte's Appointment as Regional Executive Secretary in the Pacific Northwest It gives me special pleasure to announce the appointment of Warren Witte as Regional Executive Secretary in the Pacific Northwest Region. It was seven years ago this month that he accepted appointment as Regional Executive Secretary in the North Central Region. Those seven years have involved him regionally, interregionally and as a member of a number of significant Nationwide Task Forces and committees. He expects to be just as fully involved in the life of the AFSC from his new location. Warren started his career with the AFSC in 1958 as a summer project participant. In 1960 he served as an assistant in the College and Youth Program in Des Moines, participated in a Community Services Project in Mexico, was a counselor in a summer project in 1962 and director of an international service unit in the summer of 1963. After finishing college he became College Program Secretary in 1964. In 1966 he became director of the Colorado Area Office. In 1968, he was appointed Hong Kong Representative in the Overseas Refugee Program, and in 1969 he became Coordinator of Recruitment in the National Personnel Department where he served until he returned to the North Central Region in 1971 as Executive Secretary. Warren hopes to move to Seattle with his wife, Pat, and their two children in June and expects to undertake his new responsibilities there by mid-june. As you are all aware, Warren's appointment frees Asia Bennett to make definite plans to assume her responsibilities as Associate Executive Secretary for Personnel. Asia has reviewed with her staff and committee those areas which should be covered before she leaves and has indicated that her starting date in the National Office will be May 8, 1978. We look forward to these two transfers with a great deal of anticipation.
Presentation on Quakerism to Community Relations Division Committee February 1, 1997 Warren A. Witte As a group, we Friends are not likely to share much information about Quakerism with others. This is particularly so in Quaker organizations where most of our colleagues are not members of the Religious Society of Friends. We have a strong instinct not to be pushy and not td evangelize others. We prefer to "let our lives speak" for themselves. This welldeveloped instinct has led us to become poor communicators. We think we are being respectful of the diversity of religious beliefs among our coworkers by being quiet about our own. In fact, we are often seen by them as closed and even secretive. I learned this from my colleagues in the Information Services (now Communications) Department some years ago. Aurora Camacho de Schmidt and some others on the staff challenged me on my unwillingness to engage them in the AFSC's relationships with Friends, saying that I was essentially disenfranchising them in one critical aspect of the organization's life. And I thought I was respecting them! At their urging, we developed a pattern of study of Quaker beliefs and practices-not to try to convert anyone, but to let everyone in on the basic values, traditions, and beliefs that lay behind AFSC's founding, governance, Quaker culture, and on-going relationship with the Religious Society of Friends. So, I see this presentation as an extension of what was an important learning process for me. As my staff colleagues put it to me, you deserve to have this information as committee members and employees of a Friends organization I should hasten to add, however, that I don't believe you need to know about Quakerism in order to be good people or that you need to know about Quakerism to be effective AFSC workers. I would argue, in fact, that the work of the Community Relations Division, carried out overwhelmingly by people who are not Quakers in communities that are as varied as one can imagine, makes a unique and precious contribution to Quakerism Speaking personally out of thirty years of relationship with the divisiori, I have found the work of CRD and the quality of its grappling with the core issues of our society to both challenge and illuminate the meaning of my Quaker heritage.
The contribution you make to the Society of Friends, and your work. will be strengthened, I believe, by continuing dialogue among you on Quaker values and on the values and traditions that each o(you brings to your work. As you have no doubt experienced, Quakers are hard to characterize as a group. They can include people as varied as Richard Nixon and Honey Knopp, as businesspeople and union organizers. Some brief background on Quaker history and beliefs may be useful, although this will be anything but thorough. Other Friends here may want to challenge or expand on my brief overview, and I hope they will. George Fox was the founder of the Religious Society of Friends, in the mid-1600s. England at that time was a society that was rife with conflict and radical questioning by many: His core insight was that each human being had the capacity to have a personal relationship with God and to know God's will. He came to believe that each person had a spark of the clivine within, calling it the Inner Ught or the Inward Teacher, or t.'le Christ Within A person's relationship with God didn't depend on elaborate ceremonies or clergy or large buildings. These elements of religious life, Fox came to believe, got in the way. Others were ready to hear this radical message, and Fox became leader of a small and militant group that rejected the clergy (or, even more radically, defined evervone as ministers!), that preached human equality (for everyone had access to God's will), and that rejected the church's hierarchy, its ceremonies, and it rigid theology. Fox and his followers were Christians, but they also believed that religion was ultimately the experience of God in one's life. This experience of God and the truths it revealed were more central than a rigid theology. They and many Quakers over the years since, have sought to be respectful in their relations with people of all beliefs, for they, too, had an Inward Teacher. Their core beliefs led Friends to some profound convictions: they led to a commitment to human equality and a rejection of violence-and a drive to act on these notions. That action led them into trouble, and many into jail. And their experience in attempting to live on the basis of their faith led them to new insights about their faith's demands. Their understanding of the truth was evolving, and it often called for the ability to listen to others and to their insights into God's will. The life of John Woolman in the colonial period of this country provides a powerful example of a Friend who consistently sought to understand God's will and to act on those understandings. His reflection on his participation in a business transaction related to slavery led him to be one of the early voices against the institution of slavery. Continuing experience and reflection led him to be concerned with the injustices of the economic system, and he tried to combat the roots of injustice in his
own life. For example, he refused to wear clothes dyed with indigo, which was produced by slave labor. Clear in his own religious convictions, he was also respectful of the convictions of others. He wrote in his journal about a trip to spend time with Indians, not to convert them but to see what he could learn from them. You can see that early Quaker concerns for prisons, class, slavery, economic justice and issues of race and gender provided a good deal of the agenda for CRD today! More interesting to me than these historic precedents for your work, however, are the relevance of some key Quaker concepts for the work of your division As the truth or God's will can be revealed to anyone, listening to unexpected sources of that truth (such as Woolman going to listen to the Indians in his era) becomes an essential religious practice. As the truth wasn't written down once and for all to early religious teachers but continues to be revealed to us, we must examine our experiences for new insights, and we can learn freshly about what we believe out of that examination If there is That of God in each person, we are required to address situations and institutions of injustice, for injustice is a denial of the fundamental truth about the relationship of God to the human family. Yet, we also are required to be respectful ("tender" in the terminology of early Friends) in our relationships to the perpetrators of injustice, for they, too, are part of this web of spiritual relationship. The work of the AFSC Community Relations Division over the years has been a wonderful example of these concepts. With this committee serving as a point for thoughtful reflection on the struggles of scores of communities around the country, CRD and its national committee have excelled at listening for the truth in places and from groups that most have avoided or rejected. You have continued to reflect on its experience to see what more you can learn about our basic beliefs and about what our beliefs demand of us. And you have not shied away from the inevitable tension that arises as one confronts injustice ori the side of those most severely effected and still attempts to maintain a respectful relationship with those on "the other side." I hope that this committee and staff in CRD programs will continue this dialogue. It should be mutual, including but moving beyond Quakers providing information about Quakerism to a sharing among you at the levels of your deepest beliefs, values, and experiences.
., ' J Quakerism is a unique piece of the mosaic of religious beliefs and traditions in the AFSC and among you, but I am convinced that your work and the Service Committee will be strengthened when each of you feels honored for bringing your most central values to the important effoi:"ts undertaken by CRD. Your work and that of the AFSC will be enriched when those central values are lifted up and made part of the searching and strategizing that is the work of this committee. Warren Witte had a long. history with the AFSC, serving as executive director of several regional offices, and subsequently as Director of the lnfonnation Services (Communications) Department. He is presently Executive Director of Friends Services for the Aging, an association of Quaker service providers in the mid-atlantic states.