Meeting for Sufferings: Yearly Meeting (YM)

'This year’s YM would need to revisit diversity and privilege to see what progress had been made.'

by Joseph Jones 18th March 2022

It was difficult to know someone in the Spirit unless you first knew them in the temporal, said Siobhan Haire, introducing herself as clerk nominate of YM 2022. Like many Friends, she was figuring out how to reconnect with her Local Meeting after the pandemic. The morning’s conversation about hearing from people who weren’t the usual suspects struck home with her, she said. She had initially been considered for a clerking team precisely because she was a new voice, but seven years later she had become one of those usual suspects herself. Thinking on diversity had shifted over the last decade, she added, from age – when there was a push to get people in their twenties onto committees – to a better consideration of race and gender.