QEW Structure: QEW Staff

Ruah Swennerfelt, General Secretary

RUAH HAD MANY YEARS of business administration and Quaker peace and environmental experience before being hired as full-time General Secretary in 1994. She was the first paid QEW staff member since the organization's beginning in 1987. Since then the QEW offices have been located in the rural home that she shares with her husband, Louis Cox, QEW's Publications Coordinator. Over the past 12 years, she and Louis have helped to dramatically increase the number of active QEW supporters and to raise the standing and influence of QEW within the Religious Society of Friends.

About 60 percent of Ruah's work time is spent on "outreach" activities for QEW—mail and e-mail correspondence, filling requests for information from QEW supporters, visting Quaker groups, and supplying ideas, articles, and proofreading for QEW publications. The rest of her time goes to various kinds of "administration" work—planning and coordinating QEW Steering Committee meetings and QEW-related events at Quaker gatherings, processing renewals, and maintaining the QEW supporter database. She also works closely with the QEW Continuing Counsel committee during the year and handles all of the office bookkeeping, accounting, and organizational work.

At home, Ruah enjoys flower gardening, cooking with home-grown and natural foods, learning to play the mandolin, knitting, quilting, aerobic walking, bicycling, bird watching, and keeping in touch with her children, grandchildren, and close friends.

Louis Cox, Publications Coordinator

LOUIS HAD NEARLY 10 YEARS of professional journalism experience before beginning volunteer publications work with QEW in 1990. Over the fifteen years he has served QEW, he has overseen the creation of nearly 20 Earthcare-related trifold pamphlets, a half-dozen booklets, and several books. He became paid half-time QEW Publications Coordinator in 2000.

During this period he has progressively increased his desktop publishing skills, hardware, and software, and has taken on the additional responsibilities of maintaining the QEW website. In 2005 and 2006 he created a new QEW wesite to replace the one that had been in use since 1999. He served on the QEW Steering Committee from 1990 to 2000 and has been active in staffing the Earthcare centers at FGC Gatherings and other Quaker events. He frequently accompanies Ruah in her travels for QEW and provides posters and other graphics support for these events. He and Ruah are active in the Earthcare committees of their monthly and yearly meetings.

At home Louis devotes a lot of time to 21st-century homesteading in the woods of northwest Vermont—organic gardening, cutting and storing firewood, maintaining and upgrading their renewable energy systems, and completing their off-grid, solar-heated home. He and Ruah also enjoy nature walks, wintertime cross-country skiing, bicycling, reading, board games, and playing/listening to music.

LIVING IN THE COUNTRY has offered many benefits as well as environmental challenges for Ruah and Louis. Their many opportunities for spending time in nature and living comparatively simply have strengthened their environmental witness and ability to speak with an authentic voice for the vision and witness of QEW. On the other hand, their relatively greater reliance on private automobile transport is perhaps the greatest factor in the size of their worrisome ecological footprints. Within this setting, they have made significant strides toward ecological sustainability—by reducing, reusing, and recycling and by avoiding the use of fossil fuels and toxic substances.

They are also happy to be part of a loose-knit rural community of neighbors who are not only friends but who share monthly neighborhood potlucks and neighborhood projects, as well as tools, labor, and occasional carpooling. •

For more information about Ruah and Louis’s personal “EarthPeace” witness, go to their personal website, http://www.peaceforearth.org.