An vision­ing essay I wrote in March of 1997, for Friends Insti­tute, the Philadel­phia — area young adult Friends group I was very involved with at the time. I repost it now because many of these same issues con­tin­u­ally come up in Quaker groups. See the bot­tom for the story on this essay, includ­ing the con­tro­versy it kicked up.

For more con­text about my ongo­ing con­cerns with gen­er­a­tion issues in Quak­erism, see my “Young Adult Friends page” [long ago closed down]

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I think the YAF/FI chal­lenges can be roughly divided into three cat­e­gories. They are intro­duced in the next para­graph, then elab­o­rated on in turn. They are:

1) Account­abil­ity. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and group process within YAF/FI has never been very good. We can change that, revi­tal­iz­ing the role of Busi­ness Meet­ing as set­ter of the vision and forum for sub­com­mit­tee feed­back and pol­icy setting.

2) Out­reach: Who Do We Serve. YAF/FI has done no out­reach to newly-convinced Friends and the plan­ning of events has shown an insen­si­tiv­ity to the needs of this group.

3) Activ­i­ties. We’ve had a lot of con­fer­ences with mediocre pro­grams that have lit­tle spir­i­tual or Quaker focus. We can set yearly themes as a group in advance, giv­ing Steer­ing Com­mit­tee guid­ance for par­tic­u­lar programs.

ACCOUNTABILITY:

PYM/FI has not been an orga­ni­za­tion with good com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, group process or account­abil­ity. Busi­ness meet­ings have been thought of as a nec­es­sary and begrudged task where half the par­tic­i­pants fall asleep.

Busi­ness Meet­ings should have clear, advance agenda. The YAF clerk should call for agenda items by email two weeks before the meet­ing (phon­ing promi­nent mem­bers who don’t have access to email), and send out a draft agenda the week before. Basic agenda items should include vari­a­tion on the fol­low­ing (my facil­i­ta­tion expe­ri­ence comes from Quaker-inspired but not Quaker process, so some of these tasks might need to be turned into Quakerese):

• silent wor­ship;
• agenda review;
• reports from all sub­com­mit­tees (treasurer’s report, steer­ing com­mit­tee report, dis­tri­b­u­tion com­mit­tee report, email/web report);
• two sub­stan­tive issues;
• set­ting next date;
• eval­u­a­tion of meeting;

All reports should be writ­ten (ide­ally dis­trib­uted by email before­hand and with a dozen copies at the meet­ing) and should include activ­ity, fis­cal activ­ity, pol­icy ques­tions need­ing busi­ness meet­ing input, approval of future tasks. Every deci­sion should have spe­cific peo­ple as liaisons for follow-up, and part of the next Busi­ness Meet­ing should be review­ing progress on these tasks.

OUTREACH: WHO DO WE SERVE?

I have a very large con­cern that the offi­cial YAF/FI orga­ni­za­tion does not do exten­sive out­reach and that it hasn’t always been sen­si­tive to the needs of all YAFs.

As a con­vinced Friend who first ven­tured forth to a Quaker Meet­ing at age 20, I spent years look­ing for YAFs and not find­ing them. The only out­reach that YAF/FI does is to grad­u­at­ing Young Friends (the high school pro­gram). Our out­reach to newly con­vince Friends has been nonexistent.

Other under­rep­re­sented YAFs: the Cen­tral Phila. MM group, thirty-something YAFs, YAFs of color, les/bi/gay YAFs (our Pres­i­dent Day’s gath­er­ing con­flicts with the pop­u­lar mid-winter FLGC gath­er­ing, an unfor­tu­nate mes­sage we’re send­ing), YAFs with children.

Some of the out­reach chal­lenges for YAF/FI include:

• Cliquish­ness. Many plugged-in YAFs know each other from high school days and it can be intim­i­dat­ing to jump into such a group. There’s also a reluc­tance to review assump­tions brought down from the Young Friends (high school) program;
• The poor com­mu­ni­ca­tion in YAF/FI keeps many dis­en­fran­chised YAFs from hav­ing a forum in which to express their con­cerns and needs. We can reach out to under-represented YAFs and ask them what a age-fellowship could pro­vide them;
• Single-type events: the week­end gath­er­ings keep away many YAFs with respon­si­bil­ity. The tenor of YAF/FI events often keeps away the more mature YAFs. I doubt one type of event could sat­isfy all types of YAFs. We should be open to sup­port the lead­er­ship of dis­en­fran­chised YAFs by pro­vid­ing them the money, resources and insti­tu­tional sup­port to address their com­mu­ni­ties’ need (keep­ing in mind YAF events should be open to all).

ACTIVITIES

YAF events have had their prob­lems. The­mat­i­cally, they usu­ally have not had Quaker themes, they have not been geared toward spir­i­tual growth (usu­ally First Day’s Meet­ing for Wor­ship is the only spir­i­tual com­po­nent). They have fol­lowed the pat­terns of Young Friends events (3 day gath­er­ings), even though this for­mat excludes many (most?) YAFs.

We could eas­ily have more of a mix of events. Some could be the tra­di­tional week­end events, some could be day events, like the suc­cess­ful apple-picking expe­di­tion and Swarth­more gath­er­ing a few years ago orga­nized by Friends Center-employed YAFs.

As far as I’ve known, there has never been any Busi­ness Meet­ing brain­storm­ing for themes, and each event has been orga­nized in an ad hoc man­ner by a small group of peo­ple with­out feed­back from the gen­eral YAF pop­u­la­tion. This is partly a result of the need for con­fer­ence orga­niz­ers to have a con­fer­ence planned long in advance.

I pro­pose that we set Year-Long Themes, a process that some groups employ to inter­est­ing effect. In the fall, there could be a Busi­ness Meet­ing to decide the next cal­en­dar year’s theme; Steer­ing Com­mit­tee could then orga­nize all of the pro­gram­matic events around this topic. This would give large YAF input into the selec­tion process and also pro­vide an inter­est­ing unity to top­ics. Each topic should be broad enough to allow for an inter­est­ing mix of pro­grams and each topic should have a spe­cific Quaker focus. One ped­a­gog­i­cal moti­va­tion behind these events should be to intro­duce and rein­force Friends’ his­tory and culture.

Themes that I’d love to see:

• Spir­i­tual and his­tor­i­cal roots of Quak­erism. (Becca Grunko, Mar­garet Hope Bacon, Peggy Mor­sheck might be good resource peo­ple). Events could include a look at the fiery birth of Quak­erism and an his­tor­i­cal explo­ration of Friends Insti­tute itself (founded in the 1880s, FI played a role in uni­fy­ing the Hicksite/Orthodox schism in PYM and pro­vided key assis­tance to the early AFSC; Gen­nyfer Dav­en­port is hot on the trail of this history!).
• Quak­ers in the world. a look at vol­un­teerism, and wit­ness and min­istry. An obvi­ous event would be to par­tic­i­pate in a week– or weekend-long PYM workcamp.
• Neat Quaker fig­ures (maybe even neat PYM fig­ures!). Con­fer­ences that look at the his­tory of folks like John Wool­man, William Penn, Lucre­tia Mott, per­haps cur­rent fig­ures like the Willoughby’s.
• Quaker Lifestyle and the Tes­ti­monies. Egads, we could read Faith and Prac­tice! For those of you who haven’t, it’s really an inter­est­ing book. Not all events should be the­matic, of course. The early Decem­ber Christ­mas gath­er­ing doesn’t need to be; nei­ther does some of the day long events (i.e., the apple-picking expe­di­tion was a fun theme in itelf!).

This essay writ­ten Third Month 21, 1997 by Mar­tin Kelley

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h3. The Story of this essay, writ­ten Fall of 2003
I wrote for Friends Insti­tute, the Philadelphia-area young adult Friends group, back in March of 1997. I was very involved with the group at the time, serv­ing for­mally as trea­surer and web­mas­ter and infor­mally as the de-facto out­reach coor­di­na­tor. We had a vision­ing retreat com­ing up in a few months and I wrote this as a strengths/weaknesses/opportunities piece to get the ideas rolling. I thought we had some work to do around the issues of cliquish­ness, and I also thought we could become more thought­ful and spiritually-focused but I tried to find a sen­si­tive way to talk about this issues.
I got a lot of reac­tions to this essay. Some peo­ple really really loved it, espe­cially those out­side the Philadel­phia insid­ers group: “Thanks for the insight­ful analy­sis! You really did a won­der­ful job of objec­tively explain­ing the frus­tra­tions that some PYM YAF’s (myself included) have with FI” and “I was so inspired by your essay ‘YAF vision for future’ that we are hop­ing bring it for­ward and cir­cu­late it here in among Aus­tralian YAF.“
But the insid­ers felt chal­lenged. One didn’t even like me talk­ing about cliques: “I think that as a group we have all been aware for some time of the prob­lems plagu­ing Friends Insti­tute… I don’t like the word clique because it makes me think of an exclu­sion­ary snob­bish group of peo­ple that looks down on oth­ers.” (of course this _was_ my point).
As if to prove my analy­sis cor­rect, the insid­ers imme­di­ately started talk­ing amongst them­selves. Within two weeks of email­ing this essay, both of my for­mal posi­tions in the orga­ni­za­tion were being chal­lenged. One insider wrote a request to the yearly meet­ing to set up a com­pet­ing Friends Insti­tute web­site; oth­ers started won­der­ing aloud whether it proper for an atten­der to be Friends Insi­tute trea­surer. No one ever ques­tioned my ded­i­ca­tion, hon­esty and good work. I was more actively involved in Quak­erism and my meet­ing than most of the birthright mem­bers who par­tic­i­pated in FI, and I was the most con­sci­en­tious trea­surer and web­mas­ter the group ever had. My essay had obvi­ously hit a nerve and the wag­ons were cir­cling in against the out­sider threat. Real­iz­ing just how ingrained these issues were and to what extent the insid­ers would go to pro­tect their power, I even­tu­ally left Friends Insti­tute to focus again on my monthly meeting’s thriv­ing twenty– and thirty-something scene.
The essay con­tin­ued to have a life of its own. The May 1997 vision­ing retreat focused on noth­ing at all and sube­quent busi­ness meet­ings dropped to a hand­ful of peo­ple. But the issues of the high-school focus, cliquish­ness, and unfriend­li­ness to new­com­ers came to the fore­front again a few months later, after some sex­ual assaults took place in the young adult com­mu­nity. A con­fer­ence on “sex­ual bound­aries” pro­duced an epis­tle that hit some of the same top­ics as my vision­ing essay:
bq. We iden­ti­fied a num­ber of habits and issues in our young adult com­mu­nity that tend to bring up dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions. For exam­ple, some of our sex­ual bound­aries carry over from our expe­ri­ence as high-school aged Young Friends… New­com­ers become “fresh meat” for peo­ple who come to gath­er­ings look­ing to find quick con­nec­tions… Peo­ple get lost espe­cially when we have larger gath­er­ings, and we don’t watch out for each other.
Friends Insi­tute drifted for a few years. By the sum­mer of 2000, a con­vince Friend became clerk and tried to revive the group. She found my essay and emailed me: “I’ve been look­ing over the FI archives and am impressed by your con­tri­bu­tion. Do you have any advice, sug­ges­tions, or time to become active again in FI?” Sad to say this attempt to revive Friends Insti­tute also had a lot of prob­lems.
I repost this essay here in 2003 partly to have a ongo­ing record of my Quaker writ­ings here on my web­site. But I sus­pect these same issues con­tinue in var­i­ous young adult friends groups. Per­haps some­one else can see this essay and be inspired, but a warn­ing that I’ve seen these dynam­ics in many dif­fer­ent young adult friends groups and seri­ously won­der whether reform or revival is impossible.