Common Ground Records

Common Ground was a nonprofit organization and faith community founded in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1982 by a Quaker couple, Lilith Quinlan and Hoyt Oliver, and a small group of friends from other faith traditions. Common Ground's mission was to break cycles of poverty, racism, and sexism through nonviolence education, organizing, trainings and action. Collaboration with Baton Rouge Friends Meeting, the local Clergy and Laity Concerned and Dignity chapters led to founding and complementary work at Bienville House Center for Peace and Justice. Common Ground's programs included offerings for abused children and providing hospitality for survivors of violence. Offering sanctuary for Central American refugees led to successful national organizing with legal, immigrant rights and religious/Sanctuary organizations in opposing U.S.Justice/INS/Bureau of Prisons' mass detention of refugees in remote Oakdale, Louisiana. National and regional conferences on nonviolence were held. From Indiana, the organization published journals and newsletters with and by grassroots women, including tenant organizers in New Orleans, leaders in India, Indigenous women across North America, and farmworker women in Florida. These journals, printed in-house on donated presses, were used as literacy, organizing, fundraising tools by the groups who requested and raised their voices by producing them. In Georgia, Common Ground sponsored "Women Promoting Wholeness," a group which created and organized biannual women's retreats for grassroots community leaders from diverse spiritual traditions. The organization was dissolved in 2006.