My friend Peter Blood is part of a group orga­niz­ing a “Young Friends North Amer­ica camp”:www.quakersong.org/quakercamp in Bar­nesville, Ohio this June and he asked that I help get word out about it. The first few days are a reunion for not-so-young-anymore Friends (YFNA more or less wound down in the late 1990s). The sec­ond part is the camp, which hopes “to bring together Friends from all branches of Quak­erism, to share what Spirit-led Quak­erism is about at its core–and to expe­ri­ence it together.” Check out the “Camp’s schedule”:http://www.quakersong.org/quakercamp_schedule/index.php for details on what this looks like.
The handy-dandy Friends His­tor­i­cal Dic­tio­nary says YFNA started in the mid-1950s. I’ve heard enough sto­ries (and met some YFNA cou­ples) to know it was a very impor­tant touch­stone for a few gen­er­a­tions of young Friends. I’ve been involved in a cou­ple of failed YFNA resus­ci­ta­tion attempts over the last few years and can’t tell you why none of them took. It could be eco­nom­ics (high gas prices and high col­lege loans keep­ing most 20-somethings from being too free-range) or sim­ple demo­graph­ics (too few Gen X Friends). Per­haps other events like the FGC Gath­er­ing ful­filled the young Quaker hook-up func­tion well enough.
What­ever the rea­son, I’m glad to see that reunion is tied into a free-form camp that doesn’t seem to be try­ing to be a YFNA orga­niz­ing meet­ing (at this point reviv­ing YFNA has the same empty guf­faw punch as the kids now nos­tal­gi­cally call­ing them­selves the “new SDS”:http://www.studentsforademocraticsociety.org/). It seems like there’s more Quaker youth orga­niz­ing going on, which is great, and I hope the camp helps that momen­tum.
Update: I’ve put up an “YFNA Reunion/Camp”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/events/2007-yfna/index.php page up over in the events sec­tion of Quak­erQuaker to fol­low any of the blog chat­ter about the gathering.