José Woss is a member of Friends Meeting of Washington. Since he moved to Baltimore, José has attended Homewood Friends Meeting.  José is the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) Director for Justice Reform.  In 2022, he recorded this interview for the QuakerSpeak series.

“With more than a decade of experience with policy, I’ve learned how disappointing it can be to put your faith in institutions and parties,” says José Santos Woss. Spiritual faith, by contrast, has inspired and motivated his work. 

“Quakerism really is life breathing into faith and faith breathing into life,” José explains. “It guides and informs so much of what I do and I find it such a powerfully simple and strong theology to live by.”

“Quakers are pretty white and that comes with  a lot of power and privilege…There is a need for Quakers to step out of their Meetings and away from a lot of these phenomenal institutions they have created and speak to individuals in an interfaith setting from Black churches or Black Lives Matter and have a cross-cultural understanding of what that experience is like because you will find it is very different. And I think the more we can do of that the more effective we will be in addressing these problems.  These exchanges and fusion coalitions are  what I think it is going to take not only for Quakers to be successful in dismantling racism , classism and white supremacy and addressing these problems in the country.”