Abington Friends Meeting is happy to announce that Niyonu Spann is giving the next Benjamin Lay Lecture on “Reparations: A Concept or a Life-Giving Practice?”
Saturday, November 7, 2026, at 6:45pm at Abington Meetinghouse, 520 Meetinghouse Road, Jenkintown, PA 19046. There is no charge.
Please register: forms.gle/cWB9D4x7p8MP9BMx5
Reparations: A Concept or a Life-Giving Practice?
What does it truly mean to repair? Perhaps it is not simply to join together that which has been separate, but to restore what fundamentally belongs together. To remember and make whole what has suffered a profound breach.
In this talk, Niyonu invites us to move beyond circling reparations as a compelling concept and toward embodying it as a life-giving practice — one rooted in the recognition that we belong to one another and cannot be well without one another. When that fundamental truth is obscured, even our most sincere efforts toward repair miss the radical transformation required. Reparations is ultimately about restoring right relationship and making whole again that which has suffered a profound breach.
About Niyonu
Niyonu D. Spann is a longtime Friend, educator, facilitator, artist, and practitioner of whole-systems transformation whose life and work have centered on the relationship between inner transformation and the work of justice and liberation. A member of Chester Monthly Meeting in Pennsylvania, Niyonu’s journey among Friends began in the late 1970s and has included service with Friends Council on Education, teaching and administration at Oakwood Friends School and Friends Select School, and serving as Dean of Pendle Hill. For more than three decades, she has worked with individuals, communities, and organizations to uncover and interrupt deeply embedded patterns of separation and oppression and to cultivate more just, life-giving ways of being together.
Niyonu is the founder and president of 4 Circles Beyond, Inc. and founder and lead vision holder of the Academy for Peace & Liberation Education, a Friends high school and community center being developed in Chester. She also co-founded Co-Creating Effective & Inclusive Organizations (CEIO) and created the Beyond Diversity 101 process, through which hundreds of Friends and others have engaged the personal, relational, and systemic dimensions of liberation. A vocalist, songwriter, and composer, Niyonu brings creative expression, spiritual practice, embodied knowing, and a commitment to truth-telling into all of her work. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies.