Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge is a Quaker South African politician and activist. She is currently in Philadelphia as the Friend in Residence at Haverford College. In 2008, she received an honorary degree from Haverford. She has served as South Africa’s deputy minister of defense and of health, during which time she challenged the denial of the HIV and AIDS crisis in her home country and deputy speaker of the National Assembly. She is also the founder and Executive Director of Embrace Dignity, a nonprofit campaigning for legal reform to abolish the exploitative system of prostitution and support women wanting to leave the sex industry.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge: What Makes Us a Community is Shared Humanity
Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge is a Quaker South African politician and activist. She was the deputy minister of defense from 1999 to 2004 and deputy minister of health from April 2004 to August 2007. She is currently in Philadelphia as the Friend in Residence at Haverford College. [Read more…] about Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge: What Makes Us a Community is Shared Humanity
Reflection on YAF Community Worship
Join YAFS Thursdays at 7 pm for Community Worship!
At our 6th gathering, zoom windows begin to pop up, some zoom people are totally new, some you can recognize from other gatherings, some have individuals and some have groups of housemates. People greet each other and center in. This piece of technology is now the familiar door to our meeting house. Our facilitator this week, Zenaida, welcomes us into a worshipful community: [Read more…] about Reflection on YAF Community Worship
First Day Programs: What do you need?
What do you need?
A small and vital question to be asking one another in these days. What do families in our meetings, and the adults who have care of religious education programs for children and young people, need to support the spiritual lives children and young people?
What do you need to gather?
There is no “right way” to be gathering in this time, when the needs of Friends and our capacities to meet them are unique and sometimes changing: [Read more…] about First Day Programs: What do you need?
Quaker Scholarship for High School Students
Scattergood Friends School, owned and operated by Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative), has developed a Quaker Scholarship for 9th-11th graders that covers 75% of room, board, and tuition.
It’s designed for young Friends who are active in their monthly or yearly meeting and would like to continue learning in a community like they’ve experienced growing up among Friends. [Read more…] about Quaker Scholarship for High School Students
Advance Care Planning during the Covid 19 Crisis – Critical Conversations to Have
Quakers Ted Taylor and Susan Hoskins have teamed up to encourage all adults age 18+ to have family conversations about their wishes. They feel it’s a challenging time right now, “when people can get very sick very quickly,” and families facing Covid 19 conditions may not be able to visit hospitalized loved ones. [Read more…] about Advance Care Planning during the Covid 19 Crisis – Critical Conversations to Have
Pennsylvania Council of Churches Covid-19 Letter to Governor Tom Wolf
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PYM) participates on The Pennsylvania Council of Churches. This voluntary association of separate and autonomous Christian churches, within the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, seeks to manifest their fellowship (koinonia) with one another, to engage in common ministries of witness and service, and to advance towards the goal of visible unity. [Read more…] about Pennsylvania Council of Churches Covid-19 Letter to Governor Tom Wolf
Ministry and Care: April 9 Zoom Call with Clerks and Community Leaders
Photo by Miyo Moriuchi
Monthly and quarterly meeting leadership gathered for a third time on Thursday, April 9. We began our meeting at 6:30 PM with online worship. A discussion about pastoral care in our meetings followed.
Jean-Marie Prestwidge Barch, as Clerk of PYM’s Ministry & Care Committee, spoke about the desire to frame the spiritual self-assessment practice and the resulting state of the meeting reports as reflecting upon the story of our meetings. She noted that we profit from each other’s stories. Through storytelling, we deepen a sense of our condition and open ourselves to greater spiritual growth. We celebrate with each other, mourn with each other, and also ask for help.
[Read more…] about Ministry and Care: April 9 Zoom Call with Clerks and Community Leaders
PYM Staff Snapshot: One Month of Shelter in Place
A snapshot of the Community Engagement Team’s work by Zachary Dutton, Associate Secretary for Program and Religious Life
[Read more…] about PYM Staff Snapshot: One Month of Shelter in Place
Financial Health Insights During COVID-19: Linell McCurry, Associate Secretary for Business & Finance
Linell McCurry has served PYM’s community as Associate Secretary for Business & Finance for the past eight years.
COVID-19 has thrust the United States, along with the rest of the world, into a period of recession.
The last major downturn in 2008 found PYM unprepared. The yearly meeting had posted a string of operating losses that decade and depleted cash to fund deficit spending. During the slow recovery that followed the Great Recession, PYM reduced staff by half through a series of painful layoffs. Other spending declined. Operations went into the black in 2012, and the bottom line has been positive for eight consecutive years.
We believe PYM is positioned today to ride out a period of economic uncertainty and continue providing services to meetings and our communities of young, mid-life, and elderly Friends. Thanks to Friends Fiduciary’s distribution, which is based on a rolling 12-quarter average, investment income should only flatten a bit in 2020-21. We also have a cash cushion in a rebuilt operating reserve that stands at six months’ worth of operating expenses. Staff remains small, but operating efficiencies and an embrace of technology allow us to provide as much or more service as in earlier years, all while spending less. PYM’s total expenses in FY 2019 were $200,000 less than its FY 2012 spending.
PYM has been working remotely since Monday, March 16. In the two prior weeks, as we prepared to work from home in the event of COVID-19-related limits on non-essential activity, PYM:
- Developed a protocol to make decisions about when staff would work from home, for example, if the Philadelphia schools closed or if any staff person’s home school district closed.
- Made sure everyone had a laptop and a secure internet connection.
- Developed protocols for paying bills and making grant payments remotely.
- Developed protocols for receiving mail and logging and depositing checks under work-from-home conditions.
- Developed protocols for closing the Arch Street Meeting House and having that staff rotate working from home and going in to check on the building and grounds.
- Expanded our Zoom capacity.
- Began planning for the possibility of virtual alternatives for Continuing Session on March 28 and youth programs and initiated weekly calls with monthly meeting clerks that began March 17.
The staff has adjusted to working from home amazingly well, and everyone is being paid their full wages.
The work of streamlining and automation has been in service of the broader community. For the March quarter just ended, more than one-third of PYM’s monthly meetings have been sent a check for gifts made to them on PYM’s website, a service where PYM absorbs the costs and remits 100% of the contribution. PYM offers meetings Zoom support, and 115 Friends of all ages worshiped together by Zoom on March 28.
PYM’s General Secretary, Christie Duncan-Tessmer, concluded that meeting by saying PYM wanted to create “an architecture of love in community” Everyone at home was joined across the geography of multiple states, and we shared spirit among us.
