Letters - 24 February 2023
From Dancing with the world to Bullying
Dancing with the world
We live in a world of diversity. Variation is all round us in our communities, environment and relationships. How do we bring harmony into our ever-changing world?
Quakers in Yorkshire will be exploring some of the many different steps through life and into the future. The varied steps bring us into a dance with each other. Understanding the choreography of life’s dance helps us make sense of it all.
Easter Settlement will be held from Friday 7 April to Monday 10 April at Cober Hill near Scarborough. To join the dance take a look at: https://quakersinyorkshire.org.uk/activities/easter-settlement.
Martin Schweiger
Housing trusts and mergers
I am a trustee of the Friends Housing Bursary Trust (FHBT), one of nearly 400 Quaker charities (according to the Charities Commission) that make small individual grants to help people with housing and associated living costs (https://fhbt.org.uk).
While needs continue to grow in these difficult days (and FHBT is open to new applications), the capacity of the trustees to discharge their duties becomes even more difficult as Area Meetings in turn find it ever harder to identify willing volunteers with suitable experience to take over trustee roles. An approach to a similarly-placed Quaker housing trust evinced the reply that they were too busy at this time even to consider a merger!
We would therefore be very interested to hear from the trustees of other similar trusts facing the same problems and for which a merger would considerably simplify the important issues of governance and, with greater combined assets, would contribute to increased cost effectiveness.
Ultimately, without a supply of energetic new trustees, the trust (like many small charities) will be faced with the necessity to wind the organisation up.
Peter Maple
The Friends Housing Bursary Trust
peter@kewquorum.co.uk
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