A Little Goes a Long Way to Build Faith…

PYM’s fiscal year ends September 30

This is the last month to make a 2019 Annual fund gift to help our Quaker faith thrive. We’ve finished designing the final appeal of the year and it is being delivered to some 7000 mailboxes around the yearly meeting during the first week of September.

What’s the Goal? Why does this matter to monthly meetings?

Our revised Annual Fund goal is $300,000. Reaching that goal matters because our Annual Fund helps lessen the financial burden carried by monthly meetings through covenant obligations. PYM used to figure out what Yearly Meeting’s staff, events, and programs would cost and then assessed meetings’ covenant obligations according to membership numbers with a per member “quota” charge. It was burdensome to meetings, and PYM shifted to strictly voluntary covenants—decided by the meetings themselves—with the idea that Friends with resources would step forward to give to the annual fund, thereby narrowing the funding gap.

We all know how much better today’s system feels, but we also notice Friends today don’t connect a robust Annual Fund as an essential offset to the old ‘quota’ covenant gifts, and they may not quite understand why it is so important.

 Resources are essential if Quakerism is to grow.

Friend’s gifts translate into events and programs that represent Quaker outreach. Older Friends who have finished raising children may not use the youth programs we run, but it sure makes a difference to parents looking for new ‘faith homes’ that PYM has robust youth programs that meet their children’s changing needs.

Overall, our Quaker community’s annual fund supports the human talent and infrastructure that makes us function as a community: space at Friends Center, accounting that ensures fiscal wholeness, grant work, youth programs, Sessions, care and aging work, web management, and communications.

People come to us for Faith, for spiritual growth, for community and connection. The current September appeal celebrates what our Quaker faith does through Spirit and uses the metaphor of the Labyrinth to describe our path toward transformation.

Supporting the appeal

Friends and Attenders can give through the PYM website at www.pym.org/nurture and many can also choose to make an additional gift  to their own meeting through a second drop down box that lists meetings opting in to PYM’s online gift support. Checks can be mailed to: PYM Annual Fund – 1515 Cherry Street, Philadelphia PA 19102

Giving Data

How much should people give? An average first time gift is $91. The average annual fund gift is $380 per year, (that is $95 per quarter or about $32 per month).  Giving is easy with monthly on-line gifts – and a commitment of $10 per month leads to $120 a year.

People give as they are led. All gifts support vitality in our Faith. Any amount helps.

Here’s why support matters so much. PYM networks, convenes and publicizes Quakers:

• • Our weekly PYM Weekly News & Events emails broadcast your news and events.
  • We have more impact in the world as PYM, for example:
    • Christie joined the National Council of Churches (NCC) when they met with President Sisi of Egypt;
    • We partner with others to forward the Quaker faith in public ways.

• • We provide these services whenever needed:
    • We visit meetings with high-need communities (aging or other) and support elderly friends with social work, linkages to resources, and grants.
    • We network meetings and schools with religious life and community programming
    • We support numerous collaboratives and sprints doing interesting, meaningful work.
    • We run Friends in Fellowship  and Friends in Business events that network Friends around an interesting topic and help draw attention to our Quaker values in professional situations.
    • We support and advise meetings on complex property and other issues.
    • We make all our programs, and annual sessions, affordable through grant and other support for people who wish to attend without financial burden.
    • We support Meetings in on-line fundraising, carrying the credit card transaction cost for you.
    • We help fund students in Friends schools and provide college and grad school grants.

Of course that is not all we do, just follow Melinda Wenner Bradley and her team for deep dive into Youth Religious Life Programs and see how many young Quaker hearts we touch. Watch this faith and play story from Annual Sessions and feel the power of Quaker story telling.

The illustration above is by Julie Paschkis. Julie is the illustrator for more than 30 books and is a graduate of Germantown Friends School.  www.juliepaschkis.com