Letter to Baltimore Yearly Meeting from the Clerks Regarding the Shoemaker Grant3rd Month, 17, 2015

Dear Friends of Baltimore Yearly Meeting,

As your clerks, we are delighted to announce that the Shoemaker Fund has awarded Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM) a major grant to support our Growing Diverse Leadership in BYM initiative. This grant and the program it supports provide an enormous opportunity for our Yearly Meeting to live more fully into our vision and our Quaker values in truly exciting ways. Below are links to additional documents that provide full details. In this letter, we want to underscore that the vision for this program has evolved and become bigger and broader. This effort is not just about our camps. It will engage and benefit the entire Yearly Meeting. Therefore, at Interim Meeting on 3/21/2015 at Patapsco Friends Meeting, we will be asking the Yearly Meeting to affirm the plans as they stand today, including the expanded involvement of BYM.

The grant application process has involved ongoing, iterative consultation with the Shoemaker Fund, which has been remarkably constructive, challenging us to think bigger and explore how the whole Yearly Meeting could be involved. This collaboration has revealed a remarkable alignment between the Fund’s mission and our Yearly Meeting vision.

With the energetic and insightful leadership of young adult camp alumni, the Growing Diverse Leadership in BYM program started in 2010 with a clear focus on our camps. They produced impressive results in a few years, increasing the diversity of both campers and staff at Camp Catoctin as well as developing other key program elements to support that. With that success, they initiated the idea of applying for a major grant to expand those efforts beyond Catoctin.

After several iterations, in January, the Fund came back to us again, asking “but what is the Yearly Meeting actually going to do—not just the camps, but the whole Yearly Meeting, its committees, and its local Meetings?” How will we try to engage campers, alumni, and their families in the life of our Yearly and local Meetings? And how will we measure the results? So along with your General Secretary, Development Director, and Alison Duncan, as clerk of the Camp Diversity Working Group, we brainstormed specific actions the Yearly Meeting is already engaged in and others that we could take. In early February, we then submitted an addendum to our original proposal. In doing so, we, your clerks, tried to be mindful and faithful to the aspirations already articulated through BYM’s Vision Statement and the implementation recommendations—aspirations that we felt sure the Yearly Meeting shared as a whole. We also understand that the work done under such grants is constantly evolving as we learn from our experience; we have many details to work out.

Now we are asking, does BYM affirm the broader vision for this effort? To that end, we want to share some key language from the February addendum:

Broadly speaking, our proposed program seeks to address two issues that have long been a perplexing concern for the Religious Society of Friends and BYM. First, how can our Meetings at all levels be more inclusive and welcoming to all and build multi-cultural community? Second, how can we encourage and sustain participation by young adults and develop them as leaders now and for the future? …

We in BYM have been particularly inspired by how our camp diversity program has produced impressive results that have been so elusive for Friends until now. We have much to learn from this developing effort. This grant would present a tremendous opportunity for the whole Yearly Meeting to draw from and build on this leadership from Young Adults and find ways to integrate the successes of the camp diversity program into what we do as a Yearly Meeting. At the same time, we have the opportunity to strengthen the connections between the camps and the Yearly Meeting and deepen the unity of the BYM community as a whole. We are clear that this program promises to be a catalyst for transformational opportunities for the whole Yearly Meeting in addition to its camping program.

• More specifically, let us review and clarify our broad expected outcomes, which include:
• Increased diversity at camps, in local Meetings, and the Yearly Meeting…
• Attendance at local Meetings by people who have developed a Quaker identity at BYM Camps, …
• Strong relationships between young adults and local Meeting members resulting in continued or increased young adult participation in local Meetings.
• Increased participation in local Meeting and Yearly Meeting committees and leadership roles by people from underrepresented groups such as young adults and people of color.
• A Yearly Meeting, local Meetings, and camps with increased vitality and cultural competency, helping them thrive for years to come and be patterns and examples for other Meetings and the world.

 

The addendum then lists several specific actions we could take, in these broad categories, some of which are already underway through the work of our standing Committees, even before we applied for the grant:

• Helping our Meetings be Welcoming and Inclusive
• Connecting Campers and Alumni to Meetings
• Engaging and Supporting Camp Alumni and other Young Adults in Committee Work
• Leadership Training
• Evaluating and Measuring Outcomes

Finally, in describing the relation of the Yearly Meeting and its committees to the new staff person (the Outreach and Inclusion Coordinator-OIC), to be hired with grant funds, we wrote

We are clear that the work we are undertaking is the work of all of us and could never be done or sustained only by staff. We fully understand that the role of the OIC is to help facilitate the work by all of us. …Through the efforts described here and others yet to be discerned, BYM is committed to exploring how the rest of the Yearly Meeting needs to contribute to this work. What we are contemplating is no less than a profound culture change that will permeate all we do and change us forever. Our Quaker witness demands no less.

So, Friends, are we ready? Can BYM affirm its commitment to this program that will help us fulfill our vision to be inclusive and welcoming to all, to teach and nourish Quaker ways for this and future generations, and to witness to our shared experience of the infinite Love of God?

In Love and Light,

Ken Stockbridge                   Tasha Walsh

Presiding Clerk                     Clerk of Interim Meeting