Committee Charge Submissions

#1 -The NEYM Peace and Social Concerns Committee will further the Friends’ historic mission to help prevent --- and counter the effects of -- wars and social injustice, by focusing and helping to activate the relevant leadings of its committee members, of supplicants to the committee, and of the region’s Monthly and Quarterly meetings, as the Committee collectively finds itself led.

#2 -PSC committee should develop and maintain a personal relationship with Monthly Meeting's PSC committees throughout NEYM. They should provide a conduit of information to and from Quarterly/Monthly Meetings and NEYM about what is happening in the larger body in respect to Peace and Social Concerns. The Committee serves as a centered body that listens to the leadings of the collective larger body and collectively discerns when there is a leading for corporate action. The committee then gives voice to that for further discernment by the larger body

#3 I hope that the Yearly Meeting Peace and social Concerns Committee would be at the service of the monthly meetings, trying to be in touch with issues and actions being taken, making connections across meetings and disseminating materials and news between meetings.

#4 a. I'd like to insert a noun after the "that" in the last line of #2...making it "that leading"

b. It seems to me that the two versions are very similar, but #2 offers a process --or calls for a process--to collect and communicate leadings from and to smaller bodies.

c. There seems to be an underlying assumption that our charge is action-based, that we are charged to discern when leadings should go to NEYM sessions for possible corporate action.

d. Is NEYM-wide activism a reasonable goal? Considering the 8-year-long effort to reach consensus on a corporate response to the "War on Terror" and all its accompanying catastrophes, I wonder if we should rethink the action assumption?

e. Are we trying to duplicate the activist work of AFSC and FCNL? Should we instead find ways to support them more? Can we somehow replace or extend the life of PeaceWork? Keep the video library alive?

f. Are we attempting a nearly impossible task--asking for leadings from all over New England and/or trying to triage the too-many catastrophes so we can prioritize them for all our meetings? It sounds very familiar--the same challenge all our P&J committees face all the time.

g. Should our charge have an education/communication focus instead of an action-focus? Or is that also something that is already being done by AFSC and FCNL--and many other online and off-line organizations?

h. If and when NEYM sessions finally does minute consensus on something like the current war(s), how much impact does that action have in today's world? Are 21st-century Quakers so different from 17th-century Quakers that we need to consider whether our charge should include adaptations to modern technology, to find ways to re-empower ourselves? To amplify our quiet voices?

January 26, 2010 | Aggie Mitchkoski