Coordinating Committee Weekend 2020

 

Coordinating Committees Weekend (CCW) will take place at Powell House January 24 – 26. CCW serves several purposes. While it is not a business meeting where Friends can make decisions on behalf of our Yearly Meeting, it is an opportunity for the Coordinating Committees (CCs) to get a lot of their work done and to share their work with others, outside the silos of their separate focus areas. It is a time when all Friends can gather to review and discuss common areas of concern in ways that are not easily done during spring, summer and fall business meeting gatherings, with their full agendas. Perhaps most of all, the weekend gathering is an opportunity for Friends who do not serve on CCs to visit and observe the different areas of focus and the current discernment. Friends visiting the CCs can simply listen and observe or participate when they are led to do so. Whether you expect to attend because of a commitment to a CC, or if you would like to do so as an interested Friend without a specific commitment, you are welcome. Please register at Powell House as early as possible for their food and accommodation planning. There are no fees other than the expenses of Powell House accommodations, which are graciously discounted by Powell House for this NYYM weekend.

 

CCW this year will take place in the beginning of the 325^th year of New York Yearly Meeting. Our theme will be Embracing our past, Envisioning our Future, but our agenda will be dealing with our present! We are a yearly meeting in transition, and change can be difficult. At Fall Sessions, at large membership in our yearly meeting was approved. We will be working to make that work well with all the pros and cons involved and all the places where we will need to smooth the way forward. We will be laboring to revise our outdated budgeting process in part so that new practices of our trustees of sending trust funds directly into our operating account instead of directly to committees will not disrupt previously assumed areas of distribution. We will be considering how we can function well as a smaller body than we were when our current structure was established. We will be looking to labor together as a multigenerational body of Friends. CCW this year is likely to be lively and interesting. It will set the table for the new year together. Your presence will make it that much better!

 

Jeffrey Aaron, Clerk