 November/December 1999 (XXXVII 5) |
s all of us consider our personal giving to Yearly Meeting this year and next, and what our Monthly Meetings will commit to support of the Yearly Meeting, those of us involved in PYM's work for peace and social justice would like to let you know how much your generosity supports.
Yearly Meeting is now receiving about four calls a week from teachers who ask for our help with conflict resolution training, which they believe will be more useful than metal detectors to make schools safe. Yet there has been some question at Yearly Meeting as to whether we can afford to hire anyone to fill the position left vacant by Keelin Barry, the previous specialist in school mediation training.
Under the care of the Balkans Project, Stephen Angell, 80, of Kendal Meeting (PA) is travelling to the Balkans to respond to requests for alternatives to violence training there, and he is ready to go again. The Haiti medical project is sending physician Chris Hansen of Haverford Meeting (PA) to Haiti and bringing young physicians for training at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. Now medical people in Haiti are interested in new ways to provide low-cost preventive care so they can raise healthy kids. This travel depends on funding from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
The Pennsylvania Council of Churches' Public Advocacy Action Team is asking our representative there, Alice Hoffman of Merion Meeting (PA), for Quaker help in using "consensus" in decision-making. They are also very interested in our Clemency Project in which Arthur Clark of Germantown Meeting (PA) and others are working with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and with Mennonite and Pennsylvania Prison Society leaders. The clemency working group, which includes Friends from Upper Susquehanna Quarter, is developing procedures to enable clemency and other less punitive policies as a constructive tactic in sentence commutation and prison life in general, not only in Pennsylvania but in other states as well.
These are needs which came to our attention in the Peace and Concerns Standing Committee recently. We are overseeing about a dozen other Yearly Meeting projects with work as vigorous as these. Yet we are worried as to whether we can adequately fund these active groups and we face a hard choice as to what to cut. Friends who review our finances say we are 10 percent short of the amount of money that projects seem to need for fiscal year 2000-2001, so we'll have to cut somewhere.
These projects also need a few more concerned Friends to help them develop and do the necessary leg-work. Limits on money and volunteers particularly affect the Peace and Concerns part of Yearly Meeting work because that account gets almost all its money from the General Fund — from whatever Meetings and individuals send in. A large part of our budget is reserved for the use of volunteers, to enable committed Friends to do the services to which they are called. So the scope of all Yearly Meeting's work for the social testimonies depends on people who are called to these works.
We know that there are Friends in Harrisburg and Doylestown and Barnegat Meetings, and in your Meeting too, who would be eager to help with a Yearly Meeting project. We just don't know how to find them. So if you are so led, please let us know. Call the Yearly Meeting office at 215-241-7230 or call me at 215-848-0592.
As for making up our 10 percent budget shortfall? Some Friends live at the poverty level to be free for service; some Meetings are really poor. But others of us have resources. I estimate that if the more affluent among us or our Meetings would each add $30 to each $100 we agreed to send Yearly Meeting we could meet our frugal budget needs for Peace and Concerns and the rest of our work too.
You might have to give up a bit of pleasure if you sent that extra $30. One has to choose.
Elizabeth Marsh
Lewisburg Meeting (PA)
Clerk of Peace and Concerns Standing Committee
Last modified: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 at 08:18 AM