A Tribute to Shan Cretin

Shan Cretin, a longtime leader for Southern California Friends and an international peace activist, has moved with husband Emmett Keeler to Horizon House in Seattle, Washington. Her roots in peace activism and Quakerism are deep.

Shan became a student of World War II and its horrors after spending her early years in war-torn London and then on a US Army base in Germany that had been a feeder camp for Flossenbürg concentration camp. In 1960 her family moved to Alabama where state and local government agents were unleashing brutal attacks to enforce segregation in the face of nonviolent demonstrations. The courage and effectiveness of those disciplined civil-rights activists introduced her to the power of nonviolence to overcome injustice.

Shan attended Friends meetings while attending college and graduate school in Cambridge. She discovered Friends through her activism against the Vietnam War and sent her oldest daughter to Cambridge Friends School in 1973. A graduate of MIT and Yale, Shan served on the public health faculties of Harvard, Yale, West China Medical University and University of California at Los Angeles. Her research and consulting focused on reducing errors in medicine and improving access to excellent care for all patients.

She formally joined the Society of Friends in 1987, becoming a member of Westwood Friends Meeting and transferring to Santa Monica Friends when Westwood was laid down. After 9/11/2001 she decided that peace was more broken than health care. She became director of the Pacific Southwest Region of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) for seven years, where she managed programs in Southern California, Hawai’i, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Shan served as general secretary of the AFSC from 2010 to 2017. In that role, she was responsible for AFSC’s peace and justice programs throughout the US as well as in Guatemala, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Israel-Palestine (including Gaza), Myanmar, and North Korea. Her work with AFSC taught her the importance of local community leadership in defining and addressing the root causes of violence and injustice. She also became more conscious of the legacies of colonialism and systemic racism and their persistence even within the Society of Friends.

Shan co-founded the Los Angeles chapter of Alternatives to Violence Project with the support of Santa Monica Friends. She and other members of meeting facilitated conflict resolution workshops at the Chino Youth Correctional Facility, in the Los Angeles community, and at Ben Lomond Quaker Center.

Shan was clerk of Santa Monica Friends Meeting and later served as presiding clerk of Pacific Yearly Meeting. During her time with AFSC, she participated in programs at Britain Yearly Meeting and yearly meetings throughout the US. She also represented AFSC as a panelist at three World Summits of Nobel Peace Laureates.

Shan is grateful for the spiritual foundation that Quaker practice gives to her life and her work for peace and justice. Westwood Friends, Santa Monica Friends, Southern California Quarterly, and Pacific Yearly Meetings were important, not only to Shan, but also to her three daughters–Mikala Woodward, Lauren Keeler, and Alexis Keeler–as they were growing up. Her life choices and theirs reflect the values instilled in meetings for worship and in the practice of Quaker decision-making.

The Quaker community here wishes Shan happy times in her new location, near her daughters and her five grandchildren.

from Celia Carroll, Santa Monica Friends Meeting (9/29/2024)