Dear Friends: We would like to survey Friends meetings of Pacific Yearly Meeting in California to find out how these meetings are serving and helping their communities.
Once we have that information, we would like to develop a social network so that people involved with similar programs have people to contact when they have questions. We plan to do this by developing a spreadsheet with this information about meetings’ social service programs. This spreadsheet would include the type of social service program, description and contact information of the people who are involved in the program itself and the liaisons in the monthly meeting.
We are hoping to have a draft completed by Annual Session and would like to have an interest group about this at a future yearly meeting.
These are the questions we will ask monthly meetings in our survey:
- What types of social service programs is your monthly meeting involved with to help serve
your local community? Please provide a paragraph description of each program.
- Who are the main people involved with the program itself?
- What committee in your meeting is carrying out this work? Who is the clerk?
Here is an example of how we plan to present the information that we collect: Chico Friends Meeting provides dinner once a month for the Torres Shelter. This occurs on the first Sunday of the month. Leslie Howard is the person in charge of this program for the meeting. There are four different people in charge of the meal that rotate each month. There are volunteers that help make the food and either the same or other people who help serve the food. The Torres Shelter dinner program is under the care of the Witness and Service Committee.
– David Brietzmann, San Francisco Friends Meeting, and Linnea Hanson, Chico Friends Meeting (PYM)