Baltimore Yearly Meeting 301/774-7663
of the Religious Society of Friends 800/962-4766
17100 Quaker Lane Fax: 301/774-7087
Sandy Spring, Maryland 20860-1296 bym@bym-rsf.org
January 17, 2005
Dear Monthly Meeting Clerks,
I am writing to invite you to send two or more representatives from your monthly meeting to a youth safety conference on Saturday, March 5, from 8:30 a.m. until noon at Sandy Spring Friends Meeting. As you may know, the Yearly Meeting insurance company, GuideOne insurance, has asked all Friends Meetings to develop policies to ensure that our communities and gatherings are safe, especially for the children and teenagers under our care.
The Yearly Meeting office staff has been working closely with GuideOne insurance, which has been very helpful in providing resources to help the Yearly Meeting and our monthly meetings with the task of developing policies to protect youth. Jeff Hanna, of GuideOne insurance, who formerly worked both as a pastor and as a police officer in a sexual crimes unit, now works primarily with faith communities. We have been lucky enough to get Jeff Hanna as our principal speaker on March 5. Hope Braveheart, BYM youth secretary, heard Jeff Hanna speak last October at a similar Philadelphia Yearly Meeting conference and was very impressed with his presentation. She lobbied GuideOne to make sure that we, too, could hear Jeff Hanna speak. One of his main objectives will be to help us understand some of the unique vulnerabilities we face as very inclusive faith communities.
Ideally, I hope you will encourage the clerk of your meeting’s Pastoral Care committee and the clerk of Religious Education to attend this conference together. I believe that the talks and materials available at the conference will be of tremendous help to your monthly meeting as you begin to develop or revise your own safety policies. In addition to a workshop focusing on preventing sexual misconduct, a second workshop will focus on other risks faced by our Meeting communities.
My home meeting is State College, which for historic reasons is a member of both Baltimore Yearly Meeting and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Both our State College RE clerk and our clerk of Care and Concern (our renamed Oversight Committee) attended the same Philadelphia Yearly Meeting safety conference that Hope attended and found it very helpful. They, too, recommend Jeff Hanna and attendance at the safety conference for making the daunting task of developing safety policies seem less-daunting, though still challenging.
In the past six months, BYM’s Supervisory Committee has discussed several times GuideOne’s requests and the need to develop safety policies. We keep coming back to one conclusion over and over again: developing safety policies and learning more about risks will help us build stronger, healthier meetings and safer youth and camping programs. What may seem like extra work is an important blessing in disguise. Year after year we have celebrated the gift of growth within Baltimore Yearly Meeting, which most of us attribute to the success of our youth and camping programs. As we learn more about the risks we face in these programs, we realize that we need to take extra steps to safeguard our youth and thereby our future as a yearly meeting.
Last year at annual sessions we heard the Spiritual State of the Meeting Report from Hopewell Centre Monthly Meeting, which had struggled for most of a year with the presence of a convicted sex offender in the meeting. First Day School attendance dropped precipitously. The entire experience has been very painful for Hopewell Centre. Frederick Monthly Meeting, too, has been struggling with similar issues. I hope that attendance at this conference and preparing safety policies in advance of a crisis may help other meetings avoid some of the pain and anguish that our members in these two meetings have experienced.
Please have representatives from your meeting join us for this important conference. A registration form is attached. Because the conference begins early on Saturday morning (at Jeff Hanna’s request), Sandy Spring monthly meeting will be offering a potluck dinner and home hospitality on Friday night for Friends coming from a distance. Childcare is also available if Friends register at least two weeks in advance. For questions about this conference, please contact Hope Braveheart at the Yearly Meeting office. I am also happy to respond to any questions or concerns you may have.
Faithfully,
Lauri Perman
Lauri Perman
Presiding Clerk Yearly Meeting
1448 West Park Hills Avenue
State College, PA 16803
814/234-0502
P.S. I asked Gary Fosmire, clerk of Care and Concern for
State College, if he could give me a "sound bite" for this letter based on his
experience attending the October 2004 PYM safety conference. Here's what Gary
had to say: "Jeff Hanna was a very good speaker, very dynamic. I think what I
took from his presentation was his ability to make the audience aware of how
important this subject is and what the consequences to religious congregations
can be if they don't attempt to absolutely minimize the risk. His examples of
churches where this occurred are really heart-rending."