Ethical Adventures: Family and Friends Circle
A family-friendly gathering for ethical exploration and adventure
Families of all backgrounds, particularly those with mixed religious heritage, trust Ethical Culture to provide a caring community in which children can find answers to the most important questions in life. Every Sunday, our Society offers a family-friendly gathering at 9:45 am. This Family and Friends Circle is open to all, especially to families with kids of any age. During the Circle, trained facilitators and educators offer a variety of activities for exploring ethical issues as well as opportunities for adventuring beyond the Society’s doors for ethical-action activities and learning about the world. Kids make friends and have fun as they gradually develop their own sense of morality and their own humanistic ideals.
Do you want your kids to have opportunities to connect with other kids outside of the school environment?
We are a friendly bunch from a wide area in and around Bergen County and we’d love to meet you.
Do you want your kids to have opportunities to volunteer to help others?
Our philosophy is deed before creed – we volunteer often! The NIH agrees that kids who volunteer become adults who give back to their communities.
Are you interested in the community of a church, but not interested the religious aspects?
Our members are welcome to believe whatever they want. We teach ethics and help kind find wonderful ways to participate in the world we share.
Do your kids want to have fun and feel good about their choices?
So do we! Making ethical decisions takes practice and guidance. We help kids (and grownups!) learn habits and gain awareness that stays relevant throughout our entire lives.
See our upcoming events for families.
We do a wide variety of activities during Friends and Family Circle, but we roughly follow this schedule:
- First and third Sundays of each month: Meet at the meetinghouse for group ethical exploration.
- Second, fourth, and fifth Sundays of each month: Watch for emails of events and where to meet for adventures out in the world.
To stay informed about Family and Friends Circle, send an email to leader Curt Collier at [email protected] or join our mailing list. You will be included in our email list of upcoming activities. Youth and adults of all ages are welcome to attend.
Our goal is to create a Habit of Kindness.
Here are just a few examples of our many volunteer activities:
Counting Eels in the Hackensack River
Volunteers from our Society and Groundwork Elizabeth created several “eel mops” from frayed rope to provide a safe habitat for migrating eels as they make their way up our local rivers from the ocean. We dropped the mops in the Hackensack River and took turns counting the eels we found at those sites each week during their migration season. Family & Friends Circle participants learned about the importance of the American eel to the local ecology, what it means to be a keystone species, and the importance of maintaining natural habitats. Contributing our weekly findings to the study funded by the The Hudson River Foundation’s NY/NJ Harbor & Estuary Program gave us the opportunity to make a valuable contribution and a wonderful appreciation for what it means to be a citizen scientist!
Planting Pollinators
Families pitched in to help dig out a garden bed and plant pollinator plants, giving the kids an opportunity to both learn and do. The kids got a practical, hands-on lesson in how to successfully transplant from a pot to a garden; a conceptual lesson in what biodiversity means and how it supports our environment; and the satisfaction of having helped not only beautify the garden but also provide a haven for our vulnerable pollinators.
Hunger Awareness Banquet
Every year we run an Oxfam America Hunger Awareness Banquet. Students learn about poverty and hunger around the world through a role playing event. It’s a wonderful, hands-on way to introduce big ideas about class, poverty, and access to food to even our youngest community members.
Hudson Valley Food Warehouse
We volunteer at the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley’s distribution center in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. We check expiration dates on donated food, sort it into categories, and help pack boxes so that food can be safely delivered all over the Hudson Valley.
Alex’s Lemonade Stand
The Friends and Family Circle kids planned, set up, made and sold lemonade to help fund cancer research. Alex’s Lemonade Stand is an organization founded by Alexandra Scott, a child diagnosed with cancer shortly before her first birthday. At age four, she held her first childhood cancer fundraiser in her front yard and raised more than $2,000. By the time of her death in 2004, Alex raised $1 million and inspired a legacy of hope and cures for childhood cancer. Our kids were inspired by the impact that one kid can have on the larger world.
Haiti Packathon
Every year we participate in Future Forward for Haiti’s Teaneck Packathon to make sure that kids in four remote mountain villages in Haiti have lunch at school. In 2015, joint members of the Grace Lutheran Church and Christ Episcopal Church in Teaneck came together to found Future Forward for Haiti. They have since been joined by several other religious organizations around the country, and we are happy to join this interfaith effort to improve the education and well-being of children and their families in rural Haiti.
