The Fourth and final session of Quakerism 101 will be held at the Meetinghouse on January 26 at 9:30 am.
Topic --"Quakers in the Wider World."
Kelly Kennedy will facilitate beginning with a PowerPoint including maps of Quakers in Virginia, the nation, and worldwide. With the help of three Friends with deep experience in organizations such as Baltimore Yearly Meeting, Friends General Conference, Friends Committee on National Legislation, and Friends in Unity with Nature, we'll look at how Quaker values drive their work and their outcomes.
Bring your coffee and join us Sunday January 26, at 9:30 in the Community Room. Childcare will be provided at 9:15.
Randy Cooper will share his extraordinary journey from hardship to leadership from his perspective as a credit union president in Richmond VA ......and growing up as the youngest of 11 children in Enfield NC.
Come learn and contribute to RFM’s on-going discernment around race and racism. After a two-year process involving deep listening, study, and prayerful reflection, the Ad Hoc Committee on Race & Racism presented a proposed action/implementation plan at the November business meeting. The committee will hold an information-discussion session about the plan on December 7 (Saturday) from 12:30 to 2:00 pm, both at the Meetinghouse and by Zoom.
Our committee (Barb Pedrotty, Denna Joy, Scott Morrison, Randee Humphrey/clerk) has been hard at work since May 2021, considering the potential ways and means of distributing the residual estate left to Richmond Friends Meeting by the late Carl Wayne Taylor "to directly benefit the needy in the greater metropolitan Richmond area." It has been a complex as well as gratifying process, given that Mr. Taylor had no prior direct personal connection to our Meeting.
The committee shared two items in the September business meeting. First, Scott Morrison agreed in Richmond Circuit Court on August 27 to act as successor Administrator of the Carl Wayne Taylor estate for the purposes of closing out the final accounting due to the City of Richmond's Commissioner of Accounts.
The original Administrator (who was not associated with our Meeting) has been unable to fulfill the duties and expectations of the role. Richmond Friends Meeting's trustees, Financial Stewardship committee, and Clerk reviewed the scope of the Administrator role and agreed that Scott's service in this legal capacity was both appropriate and warranted. Scott will be preparing and filing overdue tax returns; assuming responsibility for the estate bank account, including preparing and filing a formal accounting and final disposition of the assets in the account; paying out remaining filing fees and possibly late filing penalties; and finally, distributing any remaining assets to Meeting, as the sole beneficiary of the Taylor residual estate.
The second update is simply to encourage Meeting members and attenders to review the Wayne Taylor ad hoc Committee folder on the RFM website during October. By the end of September, the folder will contain annual summaries of our research activity since May 2021 and an updated PowerPoint deck that provides an overview of our leadings. The committee will be reporting again in November on its work.
Join us on Sunday, September 22, in person from 9:15-10:30 am in the Community room. In this session we'll be exploring Quaker Process. Friends make decisions about how to tend to Spirit, how to care for each other, how to nourish ourselves and our families, how to contribute to the wider communities of city, nation, all nations, and the earth. We make these decisions without the ease of hierarchy, majority vote, and, for unprogrammed friends, without clergy or paid staff. In this session, we'll explore the process we use in moving forward.
The program will focus on two practices fundamental to Friends in making spirit-lead choices and for acting: Committees and Business Meeting. As part of this session, we'll focus on terminology that may not be familiar to newcomers.
It's our hope that longtime Friends will be refreshed and refocused in Quaker process and that new attenders will come to feel comfortable in the Society of Friends and Richmond Friends Meeting.
