This year's Boise Race Amity Day festival is sponsored by the Boise Bahá'í Community, and joined in planning and support by a wonderful array of community leaders including St. Paul Baptist Church, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is an annual event each year on the second Sunday of June, inspired by the National Center for Race Amity, an organization created to advance cross-racial and cross-cultural friendship. Their website has numerous inspiring resources.
These are some additional resources to advance the cause of friendship, understanding and collaboration:
Partners in Racial Justice has a mission of "engaging in creative ways and means of bringing all people together in the pursuit of racial justice, healing, and unity."
Illumined By Oneness is an excellent resource to stimulate conversations. It was an outcome of years of conversations and reflections from multifaith dialog.
Copper to Gold provides a guide for personal transformation and exploration of attitudes and behaviors associated with anti-black racism which also helps combat any form of racism.
Consider also supporting family-friendly community Juneteenth events sponsored by Idaho Black Community Alliance on June 19 and 20. Visit their calendar for current information. The Emancipation Proclamation legally freed enslaved people on January 1, 1863, but it was unenforceable in Confederate areas until the Union army secured them.
On June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order No. 3, announcing that all enslaved people were free, over two years after Lincoln’s proclamation. It was only then that the last were freed from the despicable
slavery in our land since 1619. Juneteenth only recently in 2021 became a federal holiday.
There was almost 250 years of slavery in our land before the last slaves were legally freed and informed. Now we approach the 250th anniversary of American independence.
This message from the Bahá'ís of the United States is an invitation to thoughtful conversation about the future of our nation.
Additional devotional programs will be added. There are numerous programs on the following sites:
A helpful explanation of the value and features of devotional meetings:
"The systematic pursuit of the Plan in all its dimensions gives rise to a pattern of collective endeavour distinguished not only for its commitment to service, but also for its attraction to worship.
The intensification of activity which the next five years requires will further enrich the devotional life shared by those who serve side by side in clusters around the world. This process of enrichment is already much advanced: witness, for instance, how gatherings for worship have been integrated into the core of community life.
Devotional meetings are occasions where any soul may enter,
inhale the heavenly fragrances,
experience the sweetness of prayer,
meditate upon the Creative Word,
be transported on the wings of the spirit,
and commune with the one Beloved.
Feelings of fellowship and common cause are generated, particularly in the spiritually heightened conversations that naturally occur at such times and through which the “city of the human heart” may be opened.
By convening a gathering for worship at which adults and children of any background are welcome, the spirit of the Mashriqu’l-Adhkár is evoked in any locality.
The enhancement of the devotional character of a community also has an effect on the Nineteen Day Feast and can be felt at other times when the friends come together."
[Universal House of Justice to the Conference of the Continental Boards of Counsellors, 29 December 2015]
This list will grow. It begins now with content generated locally.