I thought that the expose on Earl­ham Col­lege was going to be this week’s Quak­er finan­cial melt-down sto­ry but Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing did the prover­bial “hold my beer” and announced it’s in seri­ous finan­cial per­il.

Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing (FUM) is the largest Quak­er mem­ber­ship orga­ni­za­tion in the world. Sim­pli­fy­ing quite a bit, it grew out of the Gur­neyites, the more churchy branch of Quak­ers who often adopt­ed min­istry and inter­na­tion­al mis­sions. Those mis­sions are the rea­son why there are so many Quak­ers in places like East Africa and Bolivia. Most of the world­wide body of Friends are part of that move­ment and many are for­mal mem­bers of FUM.

The­o­log­i­cal­ly, today’s FUM is a “big tent” asso­ci­a­tion that tries to hold togeth­er a wild­ly diver­gent set of beliefs and cul­tur­al norms, with gen­der and sex­u­al­i­ty being the most com­mon light­ning point. There’s always cor­ners of FUM threat­en­ing to leave or threat­en­ing to with­hold mem­ber­ship dues. There was seri­ous talk in the 1990s of a “realign­ment” that would split up FUM along evan­gel­i­cal and uni­ver­sal­ist lines but some­how that’s nev­er quite hap­pened and the tent has held. To its cred­it the big tent approach means that FUM has been a key facil­i­ta­tor of cross-branch dia­logue among North Amer­i­can Friends.

The finan­cial prob­lem is pret­ty straight­for­ward, a sto­ry as old as nonprofits:

Our audits have not been done in a time­ly fash­ion, inter­nal finan­cial con­trols have been miss­ing, and we did not ensure that good account­ing prac­tices were being fol­lowed. We have not been care­ful enough in review­ing finan­cial infor­ma­tion giv­en to us or in devel­op­ing the abil­i­ty of new board mem­bers to under­stand FUM’s com­plex finan­cial structure.

I’m gen­uine­ly sur­prised that FUM lead­er­ship was this asleep at the wheel but I sym­pa­thize. A non­prof­it I worked for in the 1990s went through a sim­i­lar cri­sis when a few years of back­logged audits came back and showed us we were in far worse shape than we had imag­ined. The oth­er major U.S. Quak­er asso­ci­a­tion, Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence, went though some­thing sim­i­lar in the 1980s; the sto­ry I’ve heard is that the lawyers told them they were broke to go bank­rupt and they fig­ured their way out of the finan­cial hold.

Many non­prof­its go through boom and bust cycles but this sounds more than just that. I do hope Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing can pull through.

Let­ter Regard­ing FUM Finances 

Dear Friends, we will put the bad news first: at our cur­rent income and expen­di­ture rate, FUM will…

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