Intermountain Yearly Meeting
Fall Newsletter
October 2016
Dear Friends,
Our fall newsletter includes information about the theme and speaker for our annual gathering in June, two queries for general discernment to support the work of Representatives Committee, an invitation to present a workshop or special interest group at our annual gathering, and information about upcoming IMYM and other Quaker events. I note that our theme for the gathering directly connects with one of the queries concerning our Yearly Meeting: they both involve money. Pamela Haines will speak to us on the topic, “About Money: A Call to Integrity, Community, and Stewardship,” while our secondquery is concerned with the cost of our annual gathering how we want to pay for it while making it affordable for all. We will have the opportunity to consider the questions our speaker provided in the description of our theme as we discern our responses to Query #2. I hope that this convergence will assure that the voices of those who do not attend the annual gathering are heard.
Peace,
Molly Wingate, IMYM Presiding Clerk
Theme and speaker
About Money: A Call to Integrity, Community, and Stewardship
It is hard to talk about money. On a personal level, our feelings of fear, guilt, defensiveness, secrecy, resentment, denial, worry, and/or pain can be disabling. On a societal level, few of us feel that we have the training to understand and engage with our economic system. Yet questions about money, ranging from personal practices to monthly and yearly meeting finance decisions to what our economy is for, have powerfully spiritual roots.
How do our traditional testimonies – Integrity, Simplicity, Equality, Sustainability/Community, Peace – guide us in regard to:
•stewarding our personal money and other resources?
•aligning our monthly and yearly meeting budgets and budgeting processes with our professed Quaker values?
•providing the means for the spiritual development of our families and young people to be nurtured, and for all Friends to fully participate in our activities?
•living in a corporation-dominated global capitalist growth economy that profits from war, exploitation, and environmental destruction?
•creating and participating in alternative life-sustaining economies as we steward Earth’s finite resources?
Our present money system can only function in a growing economy, yet our ever-growing economy is on a collision course with the realities of a finite planet, and is systematically moving wealth from borrowers to lenders, from those with less to those with more. How did we get to the point where our security, both individual and institutional, depends on being lenders? How can we move forward with integrity toward a right relationship with finance?
We seek spiritual guidance for living on this Earth and making our financial decisions in the light of honesty, gratitude, compassion, grace, community, and right relationship.
Our 2017 Keynote speaker, Pamela Haines, is a long-time resident of Philadelphia, managing with her husband an extended family household in a diverse neighborhood of the city. She is active in peace, justice, and environmental work in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends, in the Friends Economic Integrity Project, and in a national interfaith group, Faith, Ecology, Economy, Transformation. She has led a variety of workshops on faith, economics and investment, and is co-author of a new book, Toward a Right Relationship with Finance; Interest, Debt, Growth and Security (available online at Pamela’s paid work includes building community, leadership development and organizing for policy change among child-care workers; teaching peer counseling; and leading family play groups. She is on the board of the Mill Creek Urban Farm in West Philadelphia, and she is active with the Philadelphia Orchard Project and her community garden. She enjoys deep personal connections in Poland and Nicaragua and has helped develop community building and trauma healing work in Uganda and Indonesia. She is passionate about quilting and repair of all kinds, and blogs at
A request of meetings
The Program Working Group and Representatives Committee asks that meetings consider the list of questions included in this announcement of the theme as a way to include everyone in the conversation of this year’s annual gathering. Please send a summary or some notes of your conversations to Molly Wingate () by May 10. They will be posted on IMYM.org so they can be considered by our speaker and by those Friends who are attending the gathering and those not.
Call for IMYM 2017 SEMINARS & INTEREST GROUPS
At Yearly Meeting this year there will be seminars during early days and interest groups during the Thursday through Sunday sessions. Seminars will meet mornings Monday through Wednesday. They will either be on one topic explored in depth in the FGC model or two or three different topics that are related such as three projects which receive Quaker support. In the second case, there would likely be two or three different presenters. The interest group coordinator can help to create these groupings of related topics.
It is hoped that seminars will be related to Quakers and money in some way for examples: journaling about your relationship to money and how you spend it or creating a public bank. Interest groups will occupy a shorter time period, usually an hour and a half, meeting only once, and will cover additional more diverse topics. Is there a Meeting that could discuss presenting economic issues from a Quaker perspective to various ages in First Day School? Working for Peace? Investing options? Lobby effectively in all levels of government? Pay as Led (unless this is a seminar)? A historical look in the Bible and Quaker writings about money and its uses? These are examples of just a few of the types of topics that might be presented.
If you would like to present, contact Nancy Dolphin at to express your interest and share information on your room and A-V needs. FOR PROGRAM PLANNING PURPOSES, YOUR INFORMATION NEEDS TO BE RETURNED BY FEBRUARY 14.
Fall Queries for discernment
Please send responses to Molly Wingate, Presiding Clerk IMYM, , by January 15, 2017. There is no need for Friends to come to unity on these concerns. A record of your meeting’s discussion will be very helpful.
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Representatives Committee is charged with moving forward with our discernment about the best location(s) for our annual gathering. The charge reads, in part, “We delegate responsibility to the Representatives Committee to determine the need for a move for the 2018 Gathering and, if necessary, to enter into contract negotiations for that purpose.”To help Representatives Committee gain direction for their task, they ask that Monthly Meetings consider the following queries.
A great deal of work has been done around the idea of moving our annual gathering to a new location. Reports on the background work may be helpful to you as you consider the Fall Queries. Please look at the site selection committee information compiled for the annual gathering 2016: Also consider the results of the survey of Friends regarding the location of our annual gathering conducted in May and June by Representatives Committee
#1.a. It has been suggested that we have a trial year at a different location followed by a return to Ghost Ranch the following year. What is your Meeting's response to this?
b. These are the criteria the site selection committee used when considering possible locations: centrality of location, accessibility for people of all abilities, friendliness to all ages, capacity to house and feed 350, nearby camping, overall cost. Are there any criteria Friends want to add to the discussion?
c. What would be the most important criteria in choosing that different location?
d. We would like to hear input from people who don’t attend the annual gathering. Would a different location make them more likely to attend?
#2. Increasing cost at Ghost Ranch was a major impetus to consider a change of venue for our annual gathering. Approaches to handling the cost have been offered, including "Pay as Led,"* other ways to gather money (such as a fund raising campaign), or an intensive effort to decrease our costs (different venue, fewer days, etc.). What is your Meeting’s sense about this?
*Pay as Led is a model which New England YM has tested where each registrant is asked to pay what they are led to for the summer gathering based on information about the actual cost.
If you made it this far, you deserve some levity:
Q. How do Friends start a race?
A. Ready…..set…..go when the Spirit moves you!
Upcoming Quakerly Events:
IMYM Arrangements Meeting –(The people who organize the annual gathering and make sure that it runs well.)
January 13-15, 2017 at Albuquerque Monthly Meeting
IMYM Representatives Committee Meeting – (The people who discernbusiness and policy concerns for the Yearly Meeting and bring information and concerns back and forth between the Monthly Meetings and the Yearly Meeting.)
February 3-5, 2017 at Mountainview Meeting in Denver, C0
Intermountain Yearly Meeting Annual Gathering
June 11-18, 2017 at Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, New Mexico
Friends General Conference Annual Gathering
July 2-8, 2017 at Niagara University, Niagara Falls, NY
Announcements:
Note to clerks: IMYM has agreed to create a directory of all the Monthly Meetings and their members who wish to be part of it. Ed Kearns recently sent a request for directory information.It includes information about how the directory will be used and instructions for any who wish to opt in or out of the directory. Please attend to this request at your earliest convenience.