Sunday

 

NYYM and Conflict – March 2007 Spark

Previous Essay
How do you get to NYYM Annual Sessions?


I received a few days ago in the paper mail, the March 2007 Edition of the NYYM Newsletter, called ‘Spark’ which discusses the theme - The protracted conflict affecting 25% of the Monthly Meetings of NYYM.

Yet, the example of how the hierarchy within New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) approaches and resolves conflict, by force and by avoidance, is the institutionalized hypocrisy made clear in NYYM's latest window dressing – March 2007 Spark.

In the March 2007 edition of Spark: 'peace' - the antonym of 'conflict' was mentioned over 50 times while 'integrity', the core Friends Testimony, was mentioned only once.

Can Friends (or anyone) have peace without integrity?


Would this drawing look more natural if the caricatured Friend had stronger legs, and body, those which integrity and the other Testimonies would represent?

Click on image to enlarge

Reprinted with permission.
Signe Wilkinson, Philadelphia Daily News,
Washington Post Writers Group


What I noticed first in the current edition of Spark, upon quick scan of the pages, is the return to the telltale control of information by controlling who can speak. March 2007 Spark contains the words of the 'inner sanctum' Friends, and those coveting that status - by the names showing in the feature bylines. This is an example of how NYYM manipulates and increases conflict through avoidance of diversity of opinion. The issue is written to suggest conflict is located in Monthly Meetings, and well it might, in some locales.

But, conflict most surely also exists in the New York Yearly Meeting office. (from my own experiences there, where there is little supervision, no published time and task specific job descriptions for the full and part time employees, and where is employed a financial process, which has not been published or even shared with the Financial Services Committee. (Financial Management Guidelines – noted on page 20 of the 2004 Yearbook).

And conflict surely occurs between the elitist hierarchy which perpetuates itself and the office bureaucracy - and the common everyday Friends in the 65 constituent Monthly Meetings.

The second most recent edition of Spark - was about ‘Our Meetinghouses’ (why or how does place, all of a sudden, become important to Friends?) - and to me looked like a generous effort to reach out to the masses. The ‘Meetinghouse’ edition included bylines from new writers - many of whom are not part of the inner sanctum. 'Outsider' Friends like these writers were previously or are possibly still concerned about NYYM’s relevance. Outsiders are also concerned with the Monthly Meetings’ disproportionate financial contributions to the overweight NYYM operating budget.* (please see the charts below)

I am a witness to New York Yearly Meeting - a self-perpetuating bureaucracy in tight control of information about itself, and its (over) use of the resources of time, talent and money. We might wonder why any Friends would mind being transparent, open and truthful, if there would be nothing of malfeasance to cover?

While I was a member of NYYM, and participating on the Yearly level on the Financial Services Committee, I was asked once (by an insider whom I’ve known for many years) why I didn’t treat those who could let me into the inner sanctum of NYYM with more respect (when I could see obfuscation and evidence of financial malfeasance in their closed affairs). I didn’t respond to the Friend then, maybe because I felt the question was simply absurd. My answer now is: It’s because I feel quite strongly that there should be no inner sanctum of any living Friends body, including NYYM. There should be a healthy exchange of participants over time, which there has not been in NYYM. The inner sanctum within NYYM is most exemplified by what is called the Liaison Committee, now including a paid employee, the General Secretary, and which also includes the Clerks of the Coordinating Committees and the Clerk of the Yearly Meeting. The elite also are comprised of Trustees, and various General Services Section committee clerks. (Audit, Financial Services, Sessions, Personnel).

Here's one example of how NYYM used its hierarchy to control information to perpetuate its paid positions.

The Liaison Committee blocked a Witness Coordinating Committee minute in 10th Month 2005, where was approved an ‘information and news sharing infrastructure’, conceived and designed that Yearly Meeting Witness Committees could share news of their goings-on, minutes, announcements, pictures, links – whatever - directly with the world, all in one networked place on the Internet - all written, produced and published organically by the committees themselves. The recipients of this information, of course included the Editor of Spark, a paid employee. But the approved minute was blocked. The Liaison Committee, if asked, will say they ‘simply’ required the protocol be changed, to force the information to flow through the “NYYM Office”. Hence, the elite forced a Coordinating Committee, already up in the hierarchy, to go outside of its approved minute and make much more ongoing work for the person or persons who would implement the infrastructure. This, totally and simply, in my view - because the elite are there to conserve power and resources for themselves and the paid employees as the ultimate ‘why’ of NYYM’s existence. Historically, paid people have reasons to alter the truth.

And the truth is Friends, that while NYYM is being propped up by a few who are allowed to speak- those who George Fox called simply ‘professors’ - have their trips and mini vacations at the Powell House Retreat Center, Annual Sessions at Silver Bay, and Triennials at FUM, and FWCC, and the Gathering at FGC - paid-for. These are Friends who want to abdicate their first and most important responsibility - to their Monthly Meeting - and ascend higher and higher until their lives and the NYYM office might be located on a big puffy cumulous cloud somewhere – out of reach of those poor pedestrian Friends back on earth who just can’t possibly understand the hierarchy and complexity of the New York Yearly Meeting 'leadership'. (Maybe with electronic funds transfer becoming more widely used, Friends can just beam their money off a satellite right to the office and to the ministers on the cloud?)

Exclusion by force has been utilized over the years, through the implementation of the Coordinating Committees in the 1970s, (to put up a defense against the tsunami of soul searching hippies giving testimony at business meetings - when they came into and then left the Society during that turbulent time - the 1960’s and 1970’s).

But, as I’ve said, NYYM is simply a dead structure being perpetuated by a small insular elite group which to me has obviously been in power since the early 1990’s and the Friends World College equity action by various NYYM friends vs. the Trustees.


I’ve previously provided links to another Friend’s two missives (You Can’t Get There from Here – 1986) and (Looking for the Promised Land – 1988) of the late 1980’s which preceded the Friends World College divestiture debacle, which were read widely within NYYM. This Friend’s witness to NYYM suggested that the problems, potentially in conflict, and in making NYYM relevant to the Eternal Life, go back in time even further. What I’ve shown through evidence of financial malfeasance, (malfeasance of the NYYM elite, includes apportioning too many resources for itself, and basically living outside of the constituent Monthly Meetings’ means), as NYYM”s operating expenses are approximately 1.5 x higher than each of two of its similar neighbors – New England and Baltimore Yearly Meetings.

Here is the succinct illustration of that concept.

Full Time Employees





1980
1990
2000
2005
NYYM


2
2
3
NEYM


3
4
4.5
BaltYM
3
3
4
5



MM Contributions - to YM Adjusted for Inflation

(2005 Dollars- ,000's)


1980
1990
2000
2005
NYYM
313
423
402
476
NEYM
147
272
268
280
BaltYM
160
249
318
364
Philadelphia
879
1,101
1,037
1,078


Membership Gain / Loss



1980
1990
2000
2005
NYYM

-19%
-18%
-17%
-9%
NEYM

6%
12%
2%
0%
BaltYM

2%
18%
14%
-2%
Philadelphia

-18%
-5%
-8%
0%

What is obvious is that anyone who criticizes NYYM, especially as I have done to the financial basis for, or expression of the malfeasance, will be driven out. Before I was fully driven out, I was also removed from the Witness Coordinating Committee in 7th Month 2006, after I refused to comply with the Liaison Committee’s overruling to have the process (in the approved 10th Month 2005 News and Information Sharing Infrastructure) flow through the NYYM office, for approval and posting, instead of from the Committees directly to the public. Yes, it was me who conceived and was ready to implement the solution to having NYYM' s witness concerns add plumage to the Quaker bonnet notifying the world of its work in service to those receptive to NYYM Witness concerns.


Then, after two Friends, including myself, asked to have the Financial Services Committee meetings at (far away Silver Bay in the Adirondacks) Annual Sessions in 7th Month 2006 available to be attended via teleconference, the attempt to include more of the 9 constituent Regional Treasurers in the decision process was blocked by the NYYM Treasurer. The Clerk of the Financial Services Committee went along with the Treasurer’s wishes. I was then uninvited to the 2007 budget meeting in 9th Month 2006, when I asked the Treasurer a question that needed a specific and quantifiable answer regarding over $20,000 per year which is being spent, most probably in some way not related to costs being incurred by NYYM. (Please see 9/19/2006)

The main reason I was driven out was that I had previously written an open letter to Monthly Meetings in 5th Month 2005. A general reason I was driven out included general independence of thought and the lack of fear to speak up when I felt I could not tolerate untruth.

I believe another reason for being shunned was the essay I published in Friends Journal article in 7th Month 2006 – ‘The Costs of the Quaker Faith’ which proposed that if Monthly Meetings take stock of their own conditions, and find a balance in their annual expenditures divided into four major categories - said that Monthly Meetings would understand their missions more clearly and heal themselves, by providing the occasion for less major conflict to occur in the first place.

Force combined with avoidance can include placing the NYYM representative sessions outside of the realm of possible attendance for those who might have a conflict with the in-crowd – such as it is being done this coming 4th Month in Western New York State, where 95% of the NYYM membership lives more than 3 hours drive or flight away. I’d estimate that 80% of the NYYM membership lives more than 5 hours drive or flight and drive away from this location. I’ll go into why this is being done in a later letter, but it includes a large decision or decisions that NYYM doesn’t want many members to be present, to avoid a conflict which involves a lot of money, all flowing toward NYYM, from Monthly Meetings which are declining in membership. Hmmm, Representative Meeting was held there 3 years ago, and another large decision was approved, maybe the April 2007 meeting agenda is related to that?

The process of resolution of conflict by force or avoidance is the hypocrisy housed in NYYM and expressed in its latest window dressing – March 2007 Spark.

So, take March 2007 Spark with a grain of salt. Consider that Peace was mentioned over 50 times and Integrity, the core Friends Testimony, was mentioned once. Can Friends have peace without integrity? This was my question in 7th Month 2006 Friends Journal. Evidently the elite at NYYM thinks the answer is ‘Yes’..

Yours in Christ,
Glenn R.
Previous Essay
How do you get to NYYM Annual Sessions?


Saturday

 

Getting Personal

Dear Friend,

You may wonder what this (series of communications) has to do with your Society? My witness is to the benefit of Quakerism, and provides an example of how one Society, New York Yearly Meeting, is dying.

The ministers of NYYM have made another departure from Friends tradition to add to the list - this time using my full name in a sanctimonious letter broadcast to the body. Last week the NYYM Clerk and the NYYM Clerk of the Ministry and Counsel Coordinating Committee wrote this letter naming me to its universal mailing list, as persona non grata, and somehow also trying to impose Gospel Order upon me. I refused an offer of clearness in 10th Month 2006 with NYYM ministers for good reasons, one being the non-objectivity of those who were on this committee. My transfer out of NYYM was then blocked and then Friends also retaliated in other ways in 11th and 12th Months 2006. I began my communications after the holidays in 1st Month 2007.

I continue to show by example that I am within the Friends tradition of non-personal witness (I have not named anyone personally in my messages), and that NYYM has degraded to a point of rogue status among civil Quaker nations for many reasons (many examples of public lying, a hierarchy maintained by a few, an annual meeting which is mostly a cheap vacation (but expensive and lengthy annual sessions) for the declining populous, and other examples of authoritarian malfeasance of governance), including this reason, which I have begun to address in my communications. Next, I’ll address how NYYM has added a required registration fee applied to everyone doing NYYM’s business at its two yearly Representative Meetings, one which is upcoming in 4th Month 2007.

I publish the ministers’ letter here with my name translated to Glenn R. and their names translated to their official titles as above. I also publish my letter to these two Friends, in response to their letter showing them that I am willing to talk if they’d like to consider solutions to their degraded condition.

I also have added a simple tabular chart showing more clearly NYYM’s derelict financial contribution to wider affiliations comparatively with similar membership sized and located Yearly Meetings. Please note that NYYM is declining in membership even though it has said it is growing over the last two years, and NEYM and BaltYM have been growing over a long period of time. Please see here.

In Friendship,
Glenn R.
See the next message -
How to Get to NYYM Annual Sessions

Wednesday

 

Dear NYYM Clerk and Ministry &Counsel Coordinating Committee Clerk

Subject: your damage control letter
Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 13:54:24 -0500

From: "Glenn R"
To: 2 email addresses

Dear NYYM Clerk and Ministry &Counsel Coordinating Committee Clerk,

I understand that you feel that I'm speaking out of order. The fact is that I'm not a member of your Society, so I wonder why the invocation of Gospel Order is even used?

I personally feel sad that M&C Coordinating Committee Clerk rubber-stamped my dis-invitation from the NYYM Financial Services Committee meeting in Sept. 2006 (where the expenses and income for NYYM for 2007 was approved). Although we had a nice phone conversation after the fact, I don't know you, so (for this reason) I guess I never lost respect for you, just never gave it to you.

In terms of NYYM Clerk, I feel quite a bit of love (and respect) for you. If you feel damage control by denying anything is wrong and coming after me, is the way to go, I think you're going down the wrong road. NYYM is a society with serious problems of lying to itself, and maintaining the lie at a very nice destination for Annual Sessions among a few other issues I can't write here. I trust you are the one to not allow that to go on.

If you'd (now speaking to both) like to have a dialog, I can suggest some resignations and some things which sound like a pain in the rear, like having key people sign conflicts of interest statements annually, which I feel might help your Society grow, and hopefully end the malfeasance of authoritarian and hierarchal rule that has become de rigeur in NYYM. It was me who suggested that the GS publish his travel schedule. It was seen as a pain in the rear suggestion, but if he's such a highly paid rock star, why shouldn't it endear him to the Society? Coming clean with membership numbers and the slush in the operating budget would be a challenge of true self governance. You can do it all at once, like taking off a band-aid, it will hurt less.

And, as NYYM Clerk knows, I stated my 'agenda' when we were on Nominating Committee together in New York Quarter, and I created the outdoor meeting in New York City. I was then originally blackballed from the committee once it was formed. At the clearness for this conflict, I said, "I'm tired of sitting here and hashing over the same old 12 names to try and fill positions we can't fill because of the membership decline." (And I owe it to my Quaker family living and dead to help Friends grow). I say what I mean and I mean what I say. Growth is hard, and it is sometimes painful, but it is necessary. This I said to the Nominating Committee, when I wrote to respond to NYYM's interest for me to be renominated to Financial Services in 2006.

So, I'm gone. Is NYYM ready to roll up its sleeves and work and grow, or do you want to take the easier road (to a sleepy demise) and come after me?

In Friendship,
Glenn R.

 

Message from NYYM Clerk and Ministry and Counsel Clerk

From: NYYM Spark Editor: email address
To: same address (forwarded to NYYM Global Email List)
Subject: Message from Clerk and Ministry and Counsel Clerk
Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2007 16:01:02 -0500

Dear Friends,

It seems many Friends in New York Yearly Meeting and the wider world of
Quakerism have been in receipt of recent emails from Glenn R. You
may have seen them. We are writing you now to shed light on the situation
in order to unify our intentions to move forward in right order. It is
clear that what is being imposed on New York Yearly Meeting and its staff
cries out for Gospel Order.

Glenn R. is no longer our member. He has been released from Manhattan
Monthly Meeting and is seeking membership elsewhere, while continuing to
reside in New York. For a number of years Friends from New York Yearly
Meeting have walked with him listening to his concerns offering guidance
and prayer; there have been committees of support offered and rejected.

Friends believe that God's presence and guidance are available to all
seekers. We should listen attentively to, and reflect upon, the messages
and views of all members. When differences arise individuals first meet
face to face to air and resolve conflicts; if unsuccessful, they may meet
with a small group of Friends in a committee to try again to settle the
matter; if there is still no resolution, Friends can bring the issue before
the entire meeting for business. This communal practice enables us to sit
in prayer and allow God to wash over us with love, as we look for the
transformation within ourselves. New York Yearly Meeting has offered gospel
order to Glenn R, his response is to broadcast accusations, through
e-mails and a blog.

As the New York Yearly Meeting moves through issues and concerns about
privacy and the way information is transmitted, may we all be under the
weight of not engaging in fruitless public debate which hampers the Spirit.

We fully support the New York Yearly Meeting staff for their good works,
faithfulness, and care. Please continue to hold them in the Light as they
model integrity, courage, and groundedness in their faith.

We thank you for your patience and prayers in this matter. Please feel free
to contact Clerk and Clerk, M&C Coordinating Committee with comments or questions.

May grace be with us all,

(name removed), Clerk, New York Yearly Meeting
(name removed), Coordinating Committee on Ministry and Counsel

Peace, NYYM Spark Editor

You are receiving this because you are on the New York Yearly Meeting
global e-mail list. To be removed from this list please send an e-mail to
NYYM Spark Editor with "Remove" in the subject line.


 

Another Viewpoint to the Society

Go to the 3/7/2007 essay - What Integrity means to me

Another Viewpoint - Originally written 8/31/2006, modified Dec. 7, 2006

(This piece, written by me, and forwarded by a few individual Friends to many others, was given as the reason I was disinvited from the NYYM Financial Services Meeting -Budget Saturday, September 2006. I feel the real reason I was disinvited was that I asked the Treasurer a very simple but embarrassing question, regarding the $28,000 Bookkeeping Service expense.)

------

We might consider Friends, the physical aspect of the Quaker faith, however underemphasized of late, and its importance and relation to our inner conflict.

In this regard, the size and apportionment of expense by Monthly Meetings in the expense sections of its own budget speak to the expression of the Life in each local community. The large percentage each Monthly Meeting gives to wider bodies each year is centralizing Quakerism within New York Yearly Meeting. (This is not hard for some to visualize when our large urban Meetings are so apparently well attended.)

This is not the fault of one or two people, but the fault of all of us who have left it occur over time. New York YM now spends, in its operating budget, approximately 50% more than each of Baltimore YM and New England YM each year with fewer employees than each. NEYM and Baltimore are growing in number each year while NYYM declines (no matter what the current administration is telling us about NYYM’s ‘growth’ in numbers,. A Friend has visited these Meetings personally, sometimes unannounced, and this report of ‘numerical stability or growth in important cases ’ is simply not true).

A Friend has seen the demise of Quakerism already begun in New York Yearly Meeting by travel and first hand experience. A Friend has collected the data about the past 35 years showing the obvious steep drop-off. Friends have the option to sit back and slide or change. If we continue on this slide, members of NYYM will take the easy road to a business model where the Society relies on and serves the wealthy with a vacation each summer. We will assuage our guilt by the continuing placation of an angry and abusive minority. The historic meetinghouses will be museums, where the few remaining Friends might someday discuss the remaining testimony of peace over coffee and crackers, before the Sunday afternoon tour starts. (Note the recent NYYM failure to address simplicity in its newsletter.)

This picture is one which will develop as follows: we’ll see in increase in the number of recorded ministers – those who profess to know more than the common person. The formation of a more visible hierarchy of top-down bureaucracy will be financed by fewer and fewer wealthy individuals, and by the large urban meetings. Annual Sessions will become a month-long retreat at Silver Bay in the Adirondacks, where silence will be worshipped and the theoretical concepts of peace will be discussed. Those who attend will arrange a scholarship paid by wealthy donors, or will have family money to support them. The wealthy donors to Friends meetings will not be Friends themselves, but wealthy philanthropists needing tax deductions, sometimes given honorary memberships, who fancy the theoretical concepts of historic Quakerism. Our donors will also host lavish fundraisers in the historic and austere Quaker museums in New York City.

The beginning of this sleepy end, my Friends, is here…..unless we wake up.

First and foremost - NYYM is becoming a permanent bureaucracy which has its first goal to perpetuate full time jobs at any expense, and without due accountability and transparency - under the guise of religion.

A permanent institution or bureaucracy, especially one which presides over a declining support base, religious or not, is like a human brain in a body of a hiker undergoing hypothermia on the side of a mountain in winter. The brain of that stranded hiker has the reaction to shut down the peripheral systems. These systems are the blood flow to the outer extremities, the arms and legs - those which might be the only hope of self-rescue - in order to preserve the surely doomed heart and brain – the inner core – a little bit longer. So, the inner core of NYYM is de facto, the self-nominated, heart and brain, and has a programmed reaction to perpetuate itself even as it shuts off the support to its extremities which are its lifeblood and its potential self-rescue.

In this evolving model, Monthly Meetings will be like subsidiaries of a corporation, literally sending in to the home office, collections called ‘overhead’ to support those who provide the spiritual guidance and logistics for the local groups, and the month-long annual Sessions and retreat in summer.

This is how the quiet demise is beginning. The New York Yearly Meeting, and by Yearly Meeting, we mean the small group of insulated few who ‘run’ the Yearly Meeting central committees – Personnel, Nominating, Audit, Treasurer, Financial Services, General Services Coordinating Committee, and Trustees - have quietly decided, while the membership numbers have dropped like a stone over the past 35 years, that NYYM will have permanent employees rather than an ever-changing, sojourning staff which facilitates an annual event where Monthly Meetings discern what it is that they can all agree upon. This is how the end of any irrelevant and unresponsive organization probably looks – a few centralized, out-of-view - pulling the strings of the puppet show that we all see. Notice any similarities here to our Federal government where facts or its perennial budget shortfalls are manipulated to show a certain ‘reality’? In early September there was an expose in transparency of governance on public TV where Representative Shays (R-CT) and Cooper (D-TN) showed us the United States federal deficit is many times higher than what is published. Granted this is not a sexy topic, but its runs at the core of strife in our world and in our Society. Maybe Quakers don’t really differ from the general public? What might remain remarkable about Friends over time - is their innate integrity. But, is it gone?

How Quakers purportedly differ from Christians of other faiths is that Friends have no Synod nor Diocese in a top-down hierarchy of authority. Why a top-down permanent government is primarily having difficulty being formed in NYYM, is being discussed in Monthly Meetings of late, in how to pay for such a permanent bureaucracy.

This is because Friends, unlike those of other faiths, are very, very few in number. With so few congregations and such small budgets in each local congregation, the percentage that each congregation, each Monthly Meeting, is now being asked to contribute to this ‘overhead’ of New York Yearly Meeting in amounts approaching 50% of the total expenditures of each Monthly Meeting. In trust funded meetings, the amount sent to NYYM is in the range of 70% to over 100% of total member and attender contributions. In contrast, a local community church in the Episcopalian faith contributes somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of its annual expenditures to the Diocese. NYYM had 9 Monthly Meetings with over 200 members in 1970. In 2006, it has one – Brooklyn Meeting, the site of a large NYYM outreach initiative lately. These large Meetings are the communities which have budgets which can, in parallel, feasibly support large permanent salaries. These salaries have increased each year for at least 15 years and lifetime pensions are now part of the compensation package.

Some casually say the answer to all of our problems going forward is in the tapping of trust funds left by dead Friends. But, some might be afraid that what negative fallout occurs after hitting the lottery for a poor person and his immediate family, will also happen to Friends who would like to rely on this kind of ‘luck’. The money amassed by our forebears given in trust to us – a handout - which keeps us from really growing in number and spiritually, by allowing us the time for arguing inane details behind closed-looking doors of our unwelcoming meetinghouses - simply shows that those who do not know how to make money by serving people well, probably don’t have the wisdom and responsibility to spend money properly. Like a lottery winner, we’ll create a dysfunctional life by catering to the special interests and the hangers-on, which come out of the woodwork at the scent of free money. We’ll be poor Quakers who rely on wealthy people or trust funds in hopes that these unlimited reserves will pay our ministers, and solve all of our problems.

.

The answer, Friends, lies not in reliance on trust funds, on what someone else gives. The answer lies in what WE as Friends can give, it lies in the direct connection of Friends to our Monthly Meetings as vibrant and cohesive religious bodies. Our local communities give life from the ‘roots’ up, and the reason to be, to the annual expression of the Life in the branches and leaves of the ‘tree’ of our faith. Our faith, like a tree itself, is remarkable only in the context of our own self-imposed restrictions – our discipline in watering and pruning where needed.

Why your Meeting should consider its (large) contribution to NYYM carefully before approving it (see below)


1. Your Monthly Meeting, whether it is large or small, does members a disservice by allowing someone else to nurture and witness for you somewhere else. Your small Monthly Meeting also does itself a disservice to allow a larger Monthly Meeting to over-contribute to NYYM in lieu of under-contributions by others. Each Monthly Meeting has to be responsible for itself in order to grow physically and spiritually. Monthly Meetings should be cohesive in the sense of an organic Yearly Meeting, but be basic freestanding independent bodies at the same time.

2. The NYYM annual operating budget has increased from $400,000 to $550,000- by 1/3 since the arrival of a General Secretary in 2004. The GS was hired for $70,000 per year to live in NYC and work three days at the office, rent which very fairly now costs $28,000 per year, to oversee the ‘functioning’ of NYYM. The staff have been given raises each year for the past three years and most probably every year, while other lines have been cut. Even still, in 2006, after many cuts, the padding of the Yearly Meeting budget is evident in the amount left over from what it says it needs, what it gets from Monthly Meetings, and what it ultimately spends in a given year. NYYM built up a reserve of $225,000 over a 15-year period when it took in less than it said it needed each year over that period.

The GS does not live in NYC. He is in the office less than one day per week, and he functions more as a paid minister more than a business manager. There are no published employee reporting structure, and no published time and task specific job descriptions for employees, as Baltimore and NEYM have. NEYM and Balt YM provide valuable services to Monthly Meetings such as Youth Programs for many children, and well-designed 1st Day School programs. NYYM does not do this and if it does, it serve many fewer participants.

The Field Secretary of NEYM is paid approximately $45,000 per year to work out of his home and go into the office once per week. He has a second job as a graphic designer. The Field Secretary edits the NEYM newsletter four times per year and it is available to be distributed electronically in format. NEYM’s newsletter is far superior in content and design to NYYM’s 6 times per year - Spark. Baltimore YM GS is paid approximately $58,000 per year and must live in the Washington DC metropolitan area.

2. NYYM refuses to bring costs into line on its own. There is no mechanism within NYYM (the Financial Services Committee is there mainly to collect money to pay expenses, and has no cost cutting authority) to critically evaluate the budget requests of committees and positions on a zero-based rationale each year. And these costs, if evaluated at all, are evaluated without any kind of itemization. They are evaluated by those who have a vested self-interest in maintaining these costs, or who have become part of the Silver Bay ‘in-crowd’. The only way to ‘control’ these costs then, is to return to the classical ‘bottom-up’ financing model that gives authority to Monthly Meetings to determine what NYYM will be. Friends, do not let the return to bottom up financing die. Put in the effort earlier than later to discern your Monthly Meeting’s life as outlined in its local and wider expenditures. NYYM will then grow out, not up - in the organic and true manner of Friends.


In Friendship,

Glenn R.

Go to the 3/7/2007 essay - What Integrity means to me


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