SPRING 2008Jeff Summerton
clerk, Mullica Hill MMThis proposal from Mullica Hill Monthly Meeting will be discussed at March Quarterly Meeting and referred to each Monthly Meeting for consideration before June Quarterly Meeting.
Mullica Hill Meeting proposes to the Quarterly Meeting that it change its system of collecting funds for the Quarterly Meeting. Let us state from the start that this is not a complaint about the amount of money that is collected. We gladly support the Quarterly Meeting in its activities. We just think that the quota system has outlived its usefulness.
Yearly Meeting has stopped using the quota system and has adopted a covenant system in which meetings are asked for voluntary contributions rather than assessed an amount based on the number of members they have.
The quota probably would not be a problem except that, given the time necessary to prepare a budget, the number of members used for the budget calculation is always based on old information. Given the declining membership in most meetings, people often feel like they are being “charged” for members they no longer have, or that members who live at a distance and do not contribute the amount “charged” are not paying their share. Similar feelings were involved when the Yearly Meeting used the quota system and the Yearly Meeting has met the problem by establishing the covenant system, which asks for voluntary contributions from meetings and members.
In a sense, the Quarterly Meeting already has a defacto covenant system because some meetings cannot pay the quota amount and others pay more than their quota to help out.
We suggest to the Quarterly Meeting that if it adopts a voluntary donation (covenant) system as Yearly Meeting has done, it will help people feel less like the Quarterly Meeting is an expense that must be met and more like the monthly meetings are voluntary participants. We suggest that this be discussed at the March Quarterly Meeting and that it then be considered by each of the monthly meetings for a decision at the June Quarterly Meeting.
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