Britain Yearly Meeting trustees report
'It was ‘extremely dispiriting… to do the work with this going on… it is my integrity that is being impugned.' Marisa Johnson, clerk to trustees.
Friends then received a report from Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) trustees, with some surprise last-minute changes. ‘I was going to give a two-minute presentation,’ Marisa Johnson, clerk to trustees, said, detailing their upcoming Meeting at Swarthmoor Hall on 7-9 June. ‘But this is not what I’m going to do.’
‘I’m discomfited,’ she went on. There continues to be ‘a great deal of negative comment on social media and in the Friend’s letters pages’, she said, with ‘a great deal of misrepresentation and vilification’ regarding the request for the Quaker Socialist Society to hold Jeremy Corbyn’s Salter Lecture at an alternative venue to Friends House during Yearly Meeting.
In her report to MfS, Marisa wrote that: ‘For the record… trustees did not veto anyone, trustees did not ban anyone from Quaker premises, trustees did not de-platform anyone. In fact, trustees did not make any decisions about the Salter Lecture at all.
‘What trustees did was to consider concerns raised by some staff, evaluate risks to our programmes and well-being of employees and volunteers, in accordance with our responsibilities, and made recommendations to Agenda Committee, who accepted only one of them and offered the Quaker Socialist Society options, which they duly considered in making their own decision and subsequent arrangements, as they are entitled to do, being an independent body that sits outside of the governance structures of the Yearly Meeting.’
The report went on: ‘Apparently, according to Friends who ought to know better, the discernment of a Quaker Recognised Body with a narrow focus and a particular agenda, should be binding on any other Quaker body, regardless of their specific remit and responsibilities. Really?’
While she wished for ‘forbearance’, she told the room that the criticisms amounted to ‘trustee-bashing’. It was ‘extremely dispiriting… to do the work with this going on… it is my integrity that is being impugned. My question is: what about corporate responsibility and discipline? How do we uphold the processes of our leadership?’
Some Friends thanked the clerk for her ‘beautiful words’ and ‘being vulnerable’, with one trustee advising Quakers to have ‘a full understanding before we launch in with comment… we can do real damage to people’. Another suggested there was ‘a bigger issue that our trustees are on the hard side of… we should be allowed to say we are not happy about some of the work done by trustees, not because they are bad people, but because something is wrong with our structures’. ‘I think we should be ashamed of ourselves,’ voiced another Quaker. ‘We shouldn’t be passing judgment on social media, but supporting those who are prepared to volunteer.’
Another reflected on how they’d noticed ‘a strong feeling from reps that they were being unheard’ since coming to MfS six years ago, although the issue had improved. ‘Vilification is wrong… but we should be able to say this is not right… without it feeling like we are impugning someone else’s integrity.’ We should be ‘gentle’, she offered, while another Friend suggested: ‘We have to be resilient as well in these roles – both views are right.’
Robert Card shared a minute, which was accepted after some minor changes, including changing the word ‘criticise’ to ‘challenge’.
In the original report, the trustees asked for guidance from MfS about board effectiveness, and the development of its corporate reparations work. Friends were going to be asked what they would like to receive from trustees about work they do not already see. They were also going to be asked to share experiences of reparation work at Local and Area Meetings.
Next week: Afternoon session. See www.quaker.org.uk/mfspapers.
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