Sunday

 

The Relationship of Costs to Membership

Dear Friends,

In leaving you with a final epistle in this series, I ask you to ultimately examine not my words, but the data behind what I've stated. My hypotheses on the state of one dying Quaker Society did not come out of nowhere; they came from the evidence, from the data.

Here below, two Eastern U.S. Yearly Meetings which have drawn steeply increasing financial resources (adjusted for inflation to compare real spending over decades) up and out of Monthly Meetings have also suffered steep membership losses over a 50 year period. Two Eastern U.S. Yearly Meetings which have only slightly increased real costs to members over that period, have grown steadily.

In other words, the steeply increasing and or large total cost of a Quaker Yearly Meeting is proportional with steep total membership loss in that Quaker Yearly Meeting. How is this relationship explained? Is one the cause or the effect of the other? How does this phenomenon affect the expression of the Eternal Life in your Society?

As Yearly Meetings become centralized hierarchies, and take on more and more responsibility, activity and cost for the life of Monthly Meetings in your part of the Quaker world, does total membership in your wider body decline proportionally? I continue to ask Friends to consider these questions.

For those who have borne tales that I have an agenda or an axe to grind - so have been their unfortunate and untrue whispers. I am sanguine in my faith. My uncomfortable openings in this series will be to the benefit of true Quakerism.

Blessings,
Glenn R.
Membership Gain / Loss
1980
1990
2000
2005

declining membership

New York
- 19.1%
- 18.2%
- 16.7%
- 9.3%
Philadelphia
- 18.0%
- 5.0%
- 8.0%
0.0%

growing membership

Baltimore
2.3%
18.2%
14.3%
- 1.8%

New England

5.6%
12.0%
2.0%
0.0%

Financial Contributions per Member to Yearly Meetings*

1956
1970
1980
1990
2000
2005

Increasing More

New York
26
60
57
94
107
140
Philadelphia
23
81
65
86
88
91

Increasing Less

Baltimore
0
0
47
61
69
74

New England

40
52
39
65
63
63

Yearly Meeting Total Operating Budgets*

1956
1970
1980
1990
2000
2005

Spending More

New York
238,000
420,000
293,000
451,000
429,000
545,000
Philadelphia**
2,436,000
2,062,000
3,024,000
2,764,000

Spending Less

Baltimore***
166,000
257,000
403,000
437,000

New England

123,000
205,000
150,000
298,000
342,000
353,000

* Adjusted for inflation - all costs in 2005 U.S. Dollars

** portion of total operating budget not including grants

*** portion of total operating budget not including camping income and expense

Full Time Employees
1980
1990
2000
2005
New York
2
2
3
Baltimore
3
3
4
5

New England

3
4
4.5

See also – The Costs to Attend Three Annual Sessions

Financial Contributions to Wider Friends Bodies

Honesty and the Religious Society of Friends

4-Year Timeline of NYYM Malfeasance – including prediction for near and long term


 

A Photograph of NYYM Annual Sessions


83 people at a 2004* NYYM business session
(while the other 600 are outside enjoying the luxury destination)

(Click on Image to Enlarge)

Questions (not rhetorical):
More Important Questions NYYM Friends might ask their 'leaders'

1. Why is the NYYM Advancement Committee again using its $12,000 budget to give scholarships to the vacation at Annual Sessions, when it pledged to
take this gravy train out of service
and use those funds to help Monthly Meetings grow?


2. Why are these tired 83 people - the 'Yearly Meeting Friends' - the perennial core group of attenders at the nice destination - allowed to make decisions for the published number of 3,500 NYYM Friends,
concerning key proposals which affect the further

drawing up of resources out of the Monthly Meetings
and
into the centralized NYYM government?

3. Isn't the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), featured in the latest NYYM newsletter, evolved into something different than its Quaker founder, Larry Apsey, envisoned? Isn't AVP now an 'Alternatives to Conflict' mechanism which is how NYYM truly deals with conflict, by avoiding it and denying it?

A Simple Answer to all three questions is:

Friends in NEW YORK YEARLY MEETING
have stopped being honest
.

NYYM has stopped living within the physical and spiritual means of their declining membership. New York constituents can no longer honestly oversee the wider body and its paid employees.

* 2004 Annual Session was the first year of the three year probationary term of General Secretary, and who was in attendance that year. The above photograph was of the 'Witness Section' annual business session. The 'General Services Section' business session where less 'sexy' but critical internal decisions are made included many fewer people than in this photograph.


 

The Costs: Three Yearly Meeting Annual Sessions

The destination where NYYM holds its Annual Sessions.

Three Yearly Meetings

2007 Annual Sessions Costs / per day*

5 Nights
6 Nights
6 Nights
NEYM
BaltYM
NYYM
$
$
$
Additional Gratuity
-
-
5 %

Average Registration Fee**

3.00
0.00
6.00
Adult/Single
-
92.00
70-190
Adult/Double
66.00
76.00
95.00
Adult/Camp***
49.00
50.00
47.00
Adult/Commute
49.00
56.00
47.00
Adult/Commute/NoMeals
25.00
38.00
20.00
Youth/Camp/Commute
-
-
37.00
Youth/Bed
66.00
76.00
35-165
Child/Bed
-
37.00
35-165
Child/Floor/Camp****
24.00
22.00
37.00
Child/Meals/Only
8.00
22.00
-
Child/NoMeals
10.00
-
10.00
Toddler
0.00
0.00
0.00

* pre-registration costs based on full session

** NYYM - complex fee schedule for ages / early / late registration

*** Closest Campground - 10 miles with additional costs to camp

**** NYYM does not give discount for child on floor

Youth
Adult
Capacity
Dbl. Occ.
Dbl. Occ.
Hall
Persons
95.00
120.00
Trinity
24
2,880
85.00
110.00
The Inn
296
32,560
75.00
100.00
Bayview
81
8,100
57.50
82.50
Hilltop
51
4,208
52.50
77.50
Hemlock
72
5,580
45.00
70.00
Hepbron
110
7,700
35.00
60.00
Overlook
24
1,440

NYYM Avg. Cost / Adult

$94.94

NYYM Total Capacity

658

1 out of 5 of all Adult NYYM attenders

can spend the same or less than NEYM and BaltYM attenders

1 out of 3 of all Youth NYYM attenders

can spend the same or less than NEYM and BaltYM attenders

Monday

 

Honesty and the Religious Society of Friends

Dear Friends,

With this essay, Honesty and the Religious Society of Friends, I have moved on. I have come full circle in fully describing what I've felt should have been brought to light about a rogue and dying Yearly Meeting. If for nothing else, it is for Friends around the world to share what 'not' to do. And in the spirit of what an Australian Friend wrote me, I'm now content to let New York Yearly Meeting 'stew in its own juice'.

My focus has been the non-transparent and paid Quaker elite which has been given total responsibility by an apathetic and dying Quaker body, complacent in the ability to go to a week long vacation of sorts, as its reason-to-be, at a nice destination. The body, or the grass roots, will have to wake up, as I explained in my first essay of this series or continue the long term decline.

Other Quaker Yearly Meetings are growing. What are they doing correctly?

Yours in the Eternal Life,
Glenn R.
----

See the 4-Year timeline of Glenn R.'s outspokenness and shunning by NYYM.

Honesty and the Religious Society of Friends

I recently visited my new Quaker home where I was raised, near Baltimore, Maryland, USA. I realized for the first time that the benches in the meeting room there are probably the most uncomfortable that I’ve ever experienced. I find this interesting because recently I visited over 20 Monthly meetings in New York Yearly Meeting in a period of one year before leaving that body. After leaving Maryland and driving Northeast on through Chester County, Pennsylvania where my Philadelphia Quaker ancestors lived, we stopped to see the historic Quaker farmhouse on display in the village of Chadds Ford. Finding the museum closed for the afternoon, we drove around to Meetinghouse Road and found the (functioning) Birmingham Meetinghouse, its Peace Garden, and its eight-sided schoolroom off to the sides. We peered in the old rippled windows since those buildings were also closed. All was quiet, and no one was around on that beautiful spring late-afternoon amongst the rolling hills and gentleman horse farms. The benches in that meeting room were made exactly the same as the ones in Maryland.

I think later I realized that there is a reason that benches in a Quaker meetinghouse were never designed to be comfortable. Both of these meetinghouses, my new Quaker home, and Birmingham Meetinghouse, have cushions on the seats, mind you. I think Quakers have always meant to challenge themselves with discomfort as a way of making sure they never forget the real faith - the honest, uncomfortable intersection between the Truth and our desires in this material world.

I’ve made my views about malfeasance of governance, and propaganda to cover it up, due to severe membership decline within NEW YORK YEARLY MEETING known over the last few months, in a series of commentary about my experience and observation there.

If I have to sum up what I’ve said in those writings succinctly -

Friends in NEW YORK YEARLY MEETING have stopped being honest.

NYYM has stopped living within the physical and spiritual means of their declining membership. New York constituents can no longer honestly oversee the wider body and its paid employees.

The disproportional use of money I’ve brought to light, is simply an outward expression, or possibly a painfully clear mirror, of the inner malfeasance, which infects NEW YORK YEARLY MEETING. (NYYM spends approx. 1.5x the annual expenditure of similar and nearby, growing Yearly Meetings, and NYYM has fewer employees than each) The more Friends in NEW YORK YEARLY MEETING, of the Religious Society of Friends turn their public attention to others in the world which live unfairly, disingenuously and unsustainably, they themselves are similar offenders - in their corporate life and possibly their private religious lives.

Can Friends (or anyone) have PEACE without Honesty, or INTEGRITY, or without SIMPLICITY or EQUITY?

No.

And the hypocrisy that NEW YORK YEARLY MEETING Friends said they are peaceful or said they wanted peace without consideration of the other capitalized Testimonies noted above, was so offensive to me that I became like a good Quaker bench. I became a living pain in the back, and in the rear – asking Friends quite subtly to move forward, by re-integrating the core Friends Testimonies into their religious lives. I asked Friends to reverse their recent physical and moral decline, to make progress and grow.


Those Friends who want to be comfortable in their religious lives can continue to try and be comfortable, but I wonder if these are true Friends? Those Friends who allow themselves to suffer honesty - honestly - will continue to challenge themselves and grow – because they’re somehow uncomfortable.

This letter is written near the 2nd Annual Anniversary of the date of my letter of 5/17/2005, to all Monthly Meetings within NEW YORK YEARLY MEETING. Although that letter was well organized, used religious language and was polite, it all but guaranteed my shunning by NEW YORK YEARLY MEETING, by the elite who run it, and who were and are hereby offended by it.

Here are some suggestions your local Monthly Meeting, the basic unit of Friends Society, might consider:

Do –

- ask NEW YORK YEARLY MEETING to publish time and task specific job descriptions for its paid staff (as has Baltimore and New England Yearly Meetings, which are both growing)

- ask NYYM to make transparent its process and contacts in collecting and tabulating the annual membership number statements in the NYYM Yearbooks.

- ask the NYYM 'leadership' - committee clerks, paid employees and trustees - to give full disclosure, and sign legally binding annual conflict of interest statements which can be examined by any Friend. Here is an example of what one NYYM Monthly Meeting recently self-implemented.

- ask why NYYM spends $28,500 per year on a bookkeeping service when it probably records less than 50 transactions per month on average not including payroll. More to the point, ask how many transactions NYYM has in an average month

- ask why NYYM doesn't give nearly as much money annually as NEYM and Balt YM to the Wider Friends Organizations - FUM, FGC, and FWCC.

- ask why NYYM doesn't move its office to a less expensive and more central location

- ask why NYYM doesn't host its annual sessions at a more central and less expensive location. Ask which of the same old same-olds own property near or at the current annual sessions destination

- come to clearness whether your local Monthly Meeting wants to grow and replicate in the manner of Friends - outward - forming smaller neighborhood preparative meetings. Growth in the manner of Friends does not mean upward, by reinforcing a centralized hierarchy as has New York Yearly Meeting in the last 30 years. The choice is 1) growth - spreading outward - or 2) that your Monthly Meeting wants to die. Living organizations and organisms do one or the other, they do not stay the same – ever. Centralized organizations are not living, in the manner of Friends. A Monthly Meeting should not have more than 150 members, or it is too big.

- if the choice is to grow, Friends must take ownership of your local Quaker meeting’s life by apportioning the appropriate time, talent and money, in local affairs. And your Monthly Meeting must also apportion the correct oversight and support of Wider Bodies. No one will do it for you, and if they do, I wonder if this is true Quakerism?

- take steps to remove your meeting from the bequest/trust fund gravy train it is on. Reliance on other people's money is spiritual death row, and it causes much conflict in preparation for the demise.

Do not -

- approve a third permanent or lifetime position at NEW YORK YEARLY MEETING. The body is dying. The leadership or the same old same-olds, would like to continue to be permanent, overweight, unresponsive and non-transparent (unaccountable) if Friends let them.

- give more than 1/3 of your Monthly Meeting’s living member contributions to NEW YORK YEARLY MEETING (or any Yearly Meeting)

- send resources of money, talent and time ‘up’ to wider bodies when there is a primary unfilled need in your local community

Some Friends have thanked me for openings of discomfort I’ve felt and shared.

Others disdain me.

Amen.

See the 4-Year timeline of Glenn R.'s outspokenness and shunning by NYYM.

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