AFSC - San Francisco
Featured Resource
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AFSC San Francisco coordinates various programs and activities related to homeless organizing, peacebuilding, and public education.
Peace Education
AFSC provides support and leadership to strengthen and broaden a peace movement that bridges many issues and engages many communities. The Peace Education Program works with peace organizations and local communities to organize nonviolence programs for youth, interfaith dinners for women and religious leaders, speaking events, public actions, and popular education programs that include music and art to engage youth more effectively.
Middle East Peace
For more than thirty years, AFSC has brought Arabs and Israelis, Jews, Christians and Muslims together in common cause to work for justice and peace in the Middle East. In this region, the Middle East Peace Program is a clearinghouse for Middle East work in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area, organizing speaking tours, public events, and education campaigns and working for change in policy and practice to ensure Israeli security and Palestinian self-determination and to end the US war against Iraq.
Emergency and Material Assistance
Although our Region no longer has capacity for ongoing collection of materials for victims of wars and disasters, we will accept contributions for temporary fundraising for specific disasters. We are also proud to support the afghans for Afghans campaign and the local relief efforts of Working Essentials.Working Essentials
Since 1996, Working
Essentials has provided personal care
products, school supplies and other basic goods
to agencies offering job readiness training to
San Francisco’s working poor and homeless
people. In so doing, we have distributed
tons of toiletries, diapers and similarly
essential items to area residents seeking to
turn their lives around.
Healing Justice
AFSC promotes alternatives to incarceration,
educates the public about new justice
paradigms, and humanizes prisoners while
calling attention to the inhumane treatment
they receive through story-telling, artwork,
and public demonstrations. AFSC's Healing
Justice Program conducts research and
evaluation of existing criminal justice
policies, develops public education materials,
and sponsors art exhibits, publications, and
speaking opportunities to help get the word out
about prison issues.
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Campaign Against Use of Long-Term Isolation in California's Youth and Adult Prisons
The AFSC has launched a national campaign against the use of long-term isolation in prisons everywhere. Beginning with a conference in Philadelphia in May, 2008, in which over 400 people came together, the campaign will document the numbers of people in security housing units, control units, Maxi-Maxis, administrative segregation and other forms of isolation. They will document human rights abuses in these facilities where violations of international conventions and treaties are occurring. They will work to reduce the numbers of people in long-term isolation and to close down units wherever possible.
AFSC's new report, Buried Alive: Long-Term Isolation in California’s Youth and Adult Prisons (PDF, 1.5MB), includes the latest research on statistics and conditions in the California prison system.
- Religious Organizing Against the Death Penalty Project
AFSC's Religious Organizing Against the Death Penalty Project mobilizes people of faith in a drive to abolish the death penalty in California and other US states that still execute. The program helps people learn about their own religion's teachings on the death penalty and provides ideas, resources and common strategies for the struggle against the death penalty by people of faith.
Beyond PrisonsBeyond Prisons is a strong indictment of the current prison system, undertaken by two respected experts on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee, that traces the history and features of our penal system, offers strong ethical and moral assessments of it, and lays out a whole new paradigm of criminal justice based on restorative justice and reconciliation. The book puts forward a 12-point plan for immediate changes. Beyond Prisons, by Laura Magnani of
AFSC's Oakland Office and Harmon L. Wray, opens
a long-needed national dialogue on our
responsibilities as citizens and as a nation to
provide remediation rather than mere
retributive incarceration, so as to answer to
the common good and the justice of God.
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Campaign for Rights for the Homeless
| AFSC publication Street Spirit gives homeless people a voice through their poetry, art and cartoons, news and feature stories. |
More than 100 homeless vendors earn income by selling Street Spirit, Oakland's homeless newspaper. The paper also serves as an important tool in coordinating advocacy of issues concerning the homeless. For many activists, Street Spirit's 30,000 reader distribution provides them the most far-reaching public educational outreach available for homeless rights campaigns.