Friends who attended Annual Sessions in person or via zoom know that the council Tri-clerks asked for questions about how council functions. We received many more than we were able to answer in the brief period available, so we are sharing the full list of questions here and will be writing responses to share in the next several weeks.
If you have further questions you would like the tri-clerks to respond to, please send them to us to add to the list below.
What questions or comments do you have about the experiment currently underway with Administrative, Quaker Life and Nominating councils working as a joint council?
Please email any question or comment to CFilauro@pym.org.
Questions from the body during session regarding the work of Council
What are the three areas requiring the most time?
Do people on each area discern separately?
Can attenders serve, or only members?
What is the biggest concern the tri-council has for the life of the yearly meeting?
How is the new process different from the old?
What are the pros and cons of the change?
How do you feel about the success of this effort? What advantages have you found?
How does the joint council differ from 1- interim meeting and 2- comparable body such as New England Yearly Meeting’s Permanent Board?
Has anything been lost in the change?
Why do we need to do business between continuing and annual sessions?
Who appoints the clerk of each council?
Do the separate councils meet at another time, too? Or does the joint council discuss all business that comes up?
What is the role of the joint council?
How is the work of individual councils being completed
If social justice is a human aright then how is the administrative council supporting social justice campaigns?
What functions are joint and what are separate? Sounds like a return to interim meeting.
Are these closed sessions or is there opportunity to observe (only observe)?
The January Update on the PYM website says: “The councils will continue meeting in this format through July. Has this term end for the experiment been extended? If so, shall we celebrate that the experiment has been successful enough to warrant extending it?
What have the top themes of meetings been over the last year?
What actions result from the deliberations of the Joint Council?
How are members of Joint Council chosen? Is it truly representative of our meetings? How could it be made more transparent?
How do you feel spirit moving during this experimental time?
How would you like it to move among you in the future so more real discernment can take place? Perhaps less training?
What is the Joint Council doing to address the diminishing numbers of Liberal Friends?
Please draw a simple organizational chart of the…
How to make the meetings less crowded.
What are three of the most substantive issues you’ve considered this past 11 months
Many meetings are looking at changes to their committee structure. Any learnings from your experiment that we might find useful too?
Is it working?
How are the joint councils different from representative meeting?
How can we get prompt minutes from the joint councils?
How can we get prompt copy of the general secretary’s report to the joint council?
Do the joint councils ever meet separately?
What are we doing about losing our democracy in the US?
What’s been a surprise and challenge?
Have the three councils become self-appointing since nominating is part of it?
How are people named to sprints and other working groups?
What are the topics that take the most time for discernment and decisions?
Would like to know more about structure of Joint meetings—cross pollination—break out sessions—mixing councils.
What is the status of the anti-racism witness?
As a group, can you handle the differing challenges of the three councils adequately?
What was the greatest benefit of meeting jointly?
Is there space for council members to add to the agenda to bring new items from the body?
**Why do the three councils see value in expanding the group 3-4 times a year with members of yearly/monthly meetings as part of the process of meeting?
When operating separately, QLC was responsible to nominating 50-60 positions. In the new merged arrangement, does the nominating council help QLC fill these positions?
It is appropriate that AC and QLC have people on Nominating Council. But I hope that when nominations are made to AC and QLC that these on NC from those two recuse themselves from discussions or nominations to the councils that nominate them. Otherwise, we could repeat the in-group control of two centuries ago that led to the …..
Can it be made clear what kinds of decisions have come from Joint Council in comparison to other avenues of decision making?
Please email any question or comment to CFilauro@pym.org.
