After about 15 years with weebly, we have now teamed up with the Quaker Meetings Network and launched a new site at 
https://bradford-on-avon.quakermeeting.org/

By doing so, we have joined around 200 other Quaker Meetings and Quaker bodies in supporting a small Quaker-run website business that provides a consistent look across much of the Quaker community.

This is our last news item on this weebly site. As long as weebly allows us to do so, we will keep this news section online as a historic record for our Meeting from Spring 2020 until Summer 2025.

There is a long connection between our local Meeting and Palestine. Two of our members served in the Ecumencial Accompaniment Programme for Peace in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI). Several local Quakers were instrumental in founding Bradford on Avon Friends of Palestine that has since successfully established a friendship link between the towns of Bradford on Avon and Tubas in the West Bank. Since autumn 2023, a weekly vigil is held every Thursday morning at Westbury Gardens, once again with significant input from local Friends. While Israel's genocide in Gaza and the UK government's complicity with it continue, so does the weekly vigil.  In June, one of our members tried to take part in the March for Gaza, and on Sunday 6 July, the proscription of Palestine Action was discussed at our Meeting for Worship for Church Affairs. Watch this space for further developments.

Over the past few months, local Friends were eagerly beavering away at creating a new banner for the Meeting to be used at demonstrations and other events. The previous banner had served us faithfully for many years, but come to the end of its lifespan from a combination of wear and tear and storage in our somewhat damp basement. On Sunday 25 May, Friends presented the new banner after Meeting for Worship. It's still work in progress. Some images will be added and finishing touches applied over the next few weeks.

On Thursday 3 April, several members of our Meeting joined a silent vigil outside Manvers Street Police Station in Bath. This was to protest against the London Metropolitan Police's raid on Westminster Quaker Meeting House a week earlier, when over 20 police officers broke the front door open and arrested 6 women at a meeting of the activists' group Youth Demand that had hired one of the meeting rooms.
At least one of our members went to London to join a much larger Meeting for Worship outside New Scotland Yard, organised by Quakers in Britain who, in a statement following the raid, had concluded: "People talking and peacefully demonstrating is not a threat to society; but stopping them is."