Aligning Finances and Faith

One Meeting’s Journey Toward Right Relationship

As a big meeting with a long history in Philadelphia, Central Philadelphia (Pa.) Meeting finds itself with a significant endowment that its members had no hand in creating but are now responsible for stewarding. As one of the three partners in Friends Center in central Philadelphia (along with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and American Friends Service Committee), we also have fixed and fairly high occupancy costs, and we count on the return from investments—together with member contributions—to help cover these and other meeting-related expenses. Over the years, we have had various opportunities to reach for integrity as we engage with money. 

The Twelfth Street Fund

In 1970 we owned two meetinghouses, a result of the schism that had divided Philadelphia Yearly Meeting until being healed in the 1950s. Central Philadelphia was formed by the joining of a Hicksite meeting and an Orthodox meeting. After much reflection, the decision was made to sell the Twelfth Street meetinghouse; about three quarters of the $700,000 sale price was used to form the Twelfth Street Fund.

When the difficult decision to sell had been made, member Henry Cadbury rose and said, “This money will be the ruination of this meeting.” That remark was taken very seriously. A Proceeds Committee, intentionally made up of folks representing a wide range of views, engaged the meeting in a year-long process of bringing people of diverse opinions together in small groups. That process bore fruit: when the committee’s recommendations were brought to our monthly business meeting, unity was reached on approving the report after just 45 minutes of discussion.  

One significant point of difference—not surprisingly—was whether or not the principle of the Twelfth Street Fund should be preserved and only the interest disbursed. The Proceeds Committee addressed this as follows:

We are committed neither to preserving nor dissipating the funds, but rather recommend that we move ahead in disbursing the money as the Spirit leads us.

A second point of difference was whether to look inward to the needs of the meeting and its members or whether to look outward to the wider community around us. The committee felt:

a clear call that to meet the needs of our members is a tangible way of caring for one another in the meeting community . . . equally clear is the desire to reach out in the urban community beyond the meeting to help rectify the inequities which exist there and to find ways to further the cause of peace, both in this city and the rest of the world.

Requests for grants or loans were received and acted upon by the Proceeds Committee over the next ten years or so. A good deal of good was done and some hard lessons learned. For example, purchasing a rehabbed house and holding the mortgage to enable a lower income family to buy it was a worthwhile undertaking but became a major headache when the family ceased payments on the mortgage. 

The era of administering the Twelfth Street Fund came to an end in late 1984 when the Finance Advisory Committee brought a report to monthly meeting, noting that since its establishment the fund had disbursed over $1,000,000 in grants, loans, and gifts. They recommended that, given the low balance in the fund (approximately $160,000), it not be reopened to outside grant applications, and that:

the Fund’s cash principal should be invested in the Meeting’s Consolidated Fund held at Friends Fiduciary and the income spent in each current budget on social concerns and care of the Friends community.

The meeting approved, and this era of our engaging in the wider community via our unrestricted financial assets came to an end, with two exceptions. First, a portion ($40,000) of the remainder was invested in the Delaware Valley Community Reinvestment Fund, which supported affordable housing and childcare program capital needs in the Philadelphia area through low-interest loans. Second, the restricted funds (by action of the donor) held in our portfolio, the largest of which is for the education of “poor black children,” continued to be disbursed as always.

If our financial resources and our faith were well-aligned, what would that look like? How do we think of the meeting’s financial resources: Is it “our money” or “money for which we are the current stewards”?

The Donations Committee Years

Our second intentional effort to engage with integrity with our finances came soon after the turn of the century, when returns on investment were very high, with the result that our income well exceeded our needs. This led us to create a Donations Committee charged with bringing recommendations to monthly meeting of groups and efforts to support with that excess. The grants were smaller and fewer than had been those of the Twelfth Street Fund, but we agonized, nevertheless, over whether we were doing the greatest good possible and whether we were selecting the best and most deserving organizations. It was helpful when a member reminded us that “this is not our money, we are simply stewards of what we’ve inherited, and we should be focused on dispersal rather than micromanagement.” After five or so years, the economy slowed, the surplus disappeared, and the Donations Committee was laid down. 

Our endowment is held and managed by Friends Fiduciary Corporation. They screen for the traditional Quaker “bads” (gambling, alcohol, weapons) and additionally carry a concern to actively witness through use of their proxy votes, urging companies to be good corporate citizens. About ten years ago, members of our meeting, along with others in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, were becoming increasingly uneasy with having our money invested in fossil fuels. Members of the yearly meeting, in various configurations, shared this concern with Friends Fiduciary. When they set up a separate Green Fund, our meeting acted quickly to move some of our endowment into that new fund, understanding that we couldn’t be promised as high a return. 

This was also a time when our secretary and treasurer took on the challenge, at the request of the meeting, of moving our liquid assets from one of the big banks to a local credit union, another small step in our journey toward integrity in our relationship with money.

Impact Investing

The next notable chapter in our journey began in 2021. In an article in the meeting’s newsletter, a member wrote:

Each month at business meeting and in our committee meetings we ask: “How does this decision support CPMM [Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting] in its goal to transform into an actively antiracist faith community?” I would like to suggest that the meeting’s stewardship of our resources, specifically our invested funds, needs examination in light of this query. 

Others in the meeting agreed that it was a topic worthy of exploration, and the monthly meeting set up a working group charged with coordinating a process of information gathering to build the foundation for the working group’s discernment and the meeting’s final decision. After six months of work, the group brought back an informational report which was positively received, and for the first time, “impact investing” became part of the meeting’s vocabulary. We understand impact investments to be those made with the intention to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return, which can range from below market to market rates.

Discernment regarding next steps was turned back to the Finance Advisory Committee.  A breakthrough came when several members of the committee, along with a member who had been active in the working group and had deep financial investment experience, met with staff from Friends Fiduciary. It turned out that they were very interested in pursuing the possibility of supporting impact investing by groups like monthly meetings, and were ready to work with our meeting to do a trial run. 

Over the course of 18 months, that small group met with them several times, and Finance Advisory had in-depth discussions about all the many possible ramifications of making such a move. The issue was brought up at meeting for business in the spring of 2024 to see if the meeting would be open to a proposal to move $500,000 to investments that focused on three general areas: meeting the needs of underserved Philadelphians, addressing climate and environmental issues locally, and supporting Indigenous communities. The response was enthusiastic and Finance Advisory was authorized to work with Friends Fiduciary and come back with a specific proposal.

More work was done over the summer and early fall, and in October a proposal to move $500,000 of the assets in our portfolio to three organizations that fit the definition of impact investments was brought to meeting for business. The investment return among the three ranged from below market to slightly above market but in balance maintained a return similar to what our other investments with Friends Fiduciary bring. The meeting approved the recommendation of Finance Advisory without difficulty and with appreciation, and so the next step in our journey has been taken. It is a small step and quite a conservative one, but hopefully it will open us up to further exploration of our right relationship with money.

It is interesting to look back and reflect on what we’ve learned and what might still be learned. How are we yet to be stretched as we seek to bring our Quaker faith and our stewardship of financial resources into greater alignment? We’ve certainly learned that talking about money is hard work and that we need to be tender with each other and listen deeply. 

Questions that come to mind for further reflection include the following: If our financial resources and our faith were well-aligned, what would that look like? How do we think of the meeting’s financial resources: Is it “our money” or “money for which we are the current stewards”? How much is enough? The answer to this question may or may not accord with the meeting’s annual budget. To the extent that our meeting has resources that have accumulated across generations, what privilege has contributed to that accumulation and how might we address reparations? What is our understanding of community? There is, of course, the meeting community, but how permeable is the boundary between the meeting and the wider community? How does our answer to this question inform decisions regarding how we spend/disburse our money? We look forward to where a faithful exploration of these issues lead.