Delivered as part of the General Secretary's report to BYM's 2026 Annual Sessions at Hood College, 1 August 2026
During my first week on the job, back in 2021, the outgoing Interim General Secretary of Baltimore Yearly Meeting, handed off to me what we joking call “the BYM Bag of Keys.” Let me tell you about this bag of keys: A few of them are labeled - back closet, tan filing cabinet- do we even have a tan filing cabinet? But most of them are not labeled. A few of them are rusty, and I think there’s a bent one in there!
Don’t get me wrong, the BYM Bag of Keys has saved the day a few times! Our Finance Director got locked out of his office during his first month on the job and, low and behold, we found an unlabeled spare in the Bag of Keys. Earlier this year, we found a key to a closet that nobody had opened since 2020! Also very helpful! But some of these keys probably go to stuff we don’t even own anymore - old cabinets, vehicles we sold a decade ago, a half-dozen unknown camp locks - the detritus of Living Together.
Over the last 5 years, I’ve come to see the Bag of Keys as a metaphor for some of the challenges we are having in Living Together as a Yearly Meeting. Our structures are kind of like the bag of keys. There is some really good and important stuff in there, but over the years we’ve started to build up what’s known as organizational debt.
Organizational Debt Holds Systems Back
Organizational debt is an organizational psychology term that comes from a concept in the tech sector. Technology debt is when coders encounter a problem and make a quick fix to keep the program running in the moment for its intended purpose. However, over time those “quick fixes” build up and can begin to degrade the functionality of the software. Organizational debt is similar. It’s all the compromises made “just to get things done.” It’s all the workarounds and quick fixes and reactions to one incident. It’s all the things we do for reasons nobody even remembers. The “interest” on that debt starts to accumulate as the world changes around the organization and comes in the form of reduced capacity, less flexibility, and lower and lower engagement. It’s one of those concepts that once you hear it you’re like, yep, I know exactly what that is. BYM has some organizational debt, and I’d like to get us on a payment plan.
Some Examples of BYM's Organizational Debt
Let me give you some evidence and examples of the organizational debt we are carrying around.
- How do people get onto the Supervisory Committee? Well, we appoint a Naming Committee to constitute a Search Committee to nominate a Supervisory Committee that we then send to Interim Meeting for approval and then on to Annual Session for further approval.
- Our current committee structure requires 181 volunteers. By my calculations, many of our Yearly Meeting Committees exceed in size the average weekly attendance of many of BYM’s monthly meetings.
- Each of our core governance committees - Trustees, Stewardship & Finance, and Supervisory Committee - are currently struggling to keep their membership numbers to the bare minimum, 4-5. We’ve had no clerk of Stewardship & Finance for a year. We have no Assistant Treasurer. And as you heard from the Nominating Committee at Annual Session, they cannot fill those 181 volunteer positions.
Our house, Friends, is not in order. And it’s impacting our ability to do what we seek to do together. Now, we don’t have to feel guilty or ashamed or hide from the disorganization. Houses are the structures where we live our big, incredible, loving lives, and - they get messy. If you have ever lived in a group house or other communal living situation, you know that over time the clutter that accumulates in every cabinet and closet. You get frustrated and fed up about having no space in the kitchen one day only to clean out the cabinets and discover you have 3 panini presses left behind by various roommates over the years. Living Together: it’s messy!
The Way Forward is Together
It is time for BYM to go through the kitchen cabinets of our group house, our bag of keys, and pay down our organizational debt. Because when we pay down the debts of the past, we can invest in the right now, the living body of Friends in front of us today and the many ways we are needed in the world right now. As we heard and saw at Annual Session and in our monthly meetings each week, the world needs us. We need each other.
This fall, I am proposing a year-long Study Group on our yearly meeting structure. The full proposal will come before our November 2027 Interim Meeting, so be on the lookout. Friends are also invited to a meeting to provide me direct feedback on the proposal before it goes to Interim Meeting. The goal is that by next year, Annual Session 2027, we’ll have some research and ideas on paper to begin threshing new structures for Baltimore Yearly Meeting that support thriving of monthly meetings and the larger undertakings we engage in together. Thank you, Friends!
