Apr 08, 2010

3rd Friday Friends Festival Now Creating a Virtual Community

How do you connect beyond the color of your skin or your religious or cultural beliefs? Ask a Friday Friend and they will tell you.

On Thursday, June 3, Friday Friends (Charlotteans representing different faiths, races, and cultures) will gather from 5:30-7:30pm at The Levine Museum of The New South celebrating the “breaking of boundaries,” the correction of “wrong assumptions,” and inspiring more to connect in our city.

New this year, Friday Friends has begun to create a virtual community through Facebook. You can join the group page @Friday Friends (Meck Min) to keep up with the monthly questions and news from Friday Friends…and to create community among participants.

The program will focus on the stories and connections made through Friday Friends and how those one-on-one relationships are knocking down the walls of racism in our city and building bridges of friendships. We will celebrate current Friday Friends and help facilitate the creation of new Friday Friends connections.

Friday Friends is sponsored by a grant from Crossroads Charlotte and was launched on March 30, 2007. It seeks to bridge the gap between races and cultures. Over the years, close to 1,000 people throughout the Charlotte community have committed to being lunch partners: African American, Caucasian, Latino, Asian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian. They agreed to eat lunch one day a month (targeting the last Friday of the month) for six months to get to know each other as people – not as “categories”.

Mecklenburg Ministries, Charlotte’s leading interfaith collaborative non-profit, provides questions to help build deeper relationships as pairs explore how to build greater inter-group trust, one friendship at a time. For more information on Friday Friends or to become a Friday Friend visit: www.FridayFriends.org or become a Facebook fan @Friday Friends (Meck Min). Space at the Friday Friends Festival is limited and attendees must RSVP in advance. If you are interested in attending, please go to www.MecklMin.com and look for the Friday Friends Festival link.

Categories: Community