General Meeting for Scotland: Jane Mitchell attends via Zoom

‘The meeting decided to proceed in small steps.’

This was a well-attended meeting with over eighty Friends on about seventy-five devices. I’ll just mention some of the main items.

There was a report on the Parliamentary Engagement Working Group. This year it is preparing for the twenty-sixth UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), due to be held in Glasgow. The report encourages us to view to the Group’s webpage (www.quakerscotland.org/our-work/parliamentary-engagement). This holds several submissions that the Group has made to the government.

We discussed a letter from the Scottish Quaker Community Justice Network, an open informal network of Friends. We set up a formal group of the General Meeting (GM) so that the GM can own, and speak for, the work done on social justice in Scotland.

A representative on Meeting for Sufferings raised her concern about the effectiveness of the alternates system used there; the people who attend are different every time. She felt a lack of cohesion. She has found residential meetings, home groups and Zoom breakout rooms useful. She also felt that since the formation of Yearly Meeting trustees, the responsibilities of Sufferings are not clearly understood. The GM decided on a threshing meeting to which current and former Sufferings representatives will be invited.

At lunch some Friends indicated how pleased they were to be able to meet online. But a written report from a representative to interfaith and ecumenical bodies said that its writer was not prepared to be there via Zoom.

The main business of the day was a matter first raised in North Scotland Area Meeting (NSAM) in 2015. Here I need to set the scene. NSAM covers two cities, and it stretches right up to Shetland, the Western Isles, Skye and Appin on the mainland. In the new tabular statement it has 237 adult members and attenders. The vast majority of these live on the mainland between Aberdeen and Inverness. These cities are over 100 miles apart. Elsewhere Friends are very thinly spread, except perhaps in Orkney.

NSAM ran a listening project in 2016. Members have found the demands of being a charity a heavy burden, particularly in finding people to fill some essential roles. Late in 2017 it reported to GM suggesting a possible single charity for the whole of Scotland. In 2018-19 the GM held a meeting with the (Yearly Meeting) Simpler Meetings Project in Scotland. Since then the GM has established a communications group and arranged support and training for role-holders, and has worked on templates for matters such as safeguarding and data protection. Last autumn NSAM reported its further discernment to the GM, requesting continuing assistance, reiterating its suggestion of reducing the number of distinct charities in Scotland.

The meeting decided to proceed in small steps. It will set up a working group to explore and evaluate options for later consideration. They will note the recent experiences of Wales, London and Yorkshire. We seemed to have worked hard, but I felt it was a productive meeting.

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Comments

The suggestion of a single charity for the whole of Scotland to ease the “unforeseen consequences” of so many charities established around 2008 might be a good suggestion for Quakers in England too. Large means that professionals can be employed to address “the demands of being a charity a heavy burden” and to address other risks that follow from too few volunteers being available what often seems to be, extremely large amounts of money.
Good Luck. I hope it comes about. Definitely part of simplification. best wishes David Fish rugby quaker meeting

By davidfishcf@msn.com on 20th June 2022 - 15:26

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