An Experiment in Holy Abundance

Community solar installation (Concord Meeting) 2016. Photos courtesy of the author.

The 2012 sale of the New England Friends Home in Hingham, Massachusetts, provided New England Yearly Meeting (NEYM) with an abundance of $1,100,000 net proceeds—and the challenge of discerning what God was calling us to do with it. We spent two years seeking input and proposals via meetings and surveys. Once clarity was reached to use the bulk of the funds to support ministry and witness among us, the financial questions arose. In 2014, Cuban Friends visiting yearly meeting sessions asked: “How can we be a Church with money in our pocket?” “How can we use all our resources to be God’s people in the world?”

In response, some Friends advocated giving it all away, while others encouraged using a small percentage each year while preserving the principal for the future. Friends came to unity to do both, creating two funds as part of an overall Legacy Gift Fund. One of these specific funds, the NEYM Witness and Ministry Fund, was started with $750,000 as a quasi-endowment to draw four percent each year to provide grants. The remaining balance (and accumulated earnings) of $470,975 became the NEYM Future Fund, available to distribute until it was all put to use. Applications, guidelines, priorities and procedures were developed and the Legacy Gift Committee was created to implement the two new funds. This experiment was to be reviewed in 2024 after the initial 10 years to see if it still had life.

In 2015 NEYM approved the following statement of purpose:

Guided by our living testimonies, we seek to strengthen our Witness through the funding of public and released ministry, with attention to Racism and Climate Change, and to nurture our beloved community through the support of education, outreach, released ministry and meetinghouse projects. Our hope is that the Legacy Funds will serve as potent seeds to help Friends answer God’s call in our time and to strengthen the new life that is already rising up in our yearly meeting.

For 10 years now, the Legacy Gift Committee has engaged in this experiment of holy abundance, inviting funding requests for up to $10,000 via two annual application review cycles. Since inception, the Future Fund awarded grants totaling $541,953. It was completely spent down, as intended, in 2020, having grown even while it was being used. As of June 2024, the Witness and Ministry fund has awarded grants totaling $202,999, drawn from annual investment income.

Several years ago, wanting to be able to respond to opportunities and short term leadings that arose between the two annual funding cycles, we added time-sensitive grants of up to $1,000 that are available on a rolling basis. Time-sensitive grants have funded things like helping Friends participate in Beyond Diversity 101 workshops or traveling to a border march organized by the American Friends Service Committee.

Our applicants are young adult Friends, retirees, and all ages in between from across NEYM. Many have never written a funding application or calculated a project budget before. They come from large urban meetings and from very small rural meetings with varying levels of experience or capacity for supporting witness and ministry. Sometimes more seasoning is needed. Sometimes the leading changes along the way. Legacy Gift Committee works with the applicants and their meetings as needed, through the process of applying, reviewing, and ensuring spiritual and fiscal support during the Legacy-funded life of the leading.

As of June 2024, 41 of NEYM’s 62 Friends meetings have benefitted from Legacy Gift funds (either as a meeting or in supporting the witness or ministry of individuals). Over half of them have received more than one grant. Meetings in all of NEYM’s quarters have been touched by Legacy Gift funding, including a majority of the meetings in six of the eight quarters. Approximately 25 other Friends-related groups and organizations, including Friend schools; Friends Camp in South China, Maine; Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston, Massachusetts; Woolman Hill Quaker Retreat Center in Deerfield, Massachusetts; Quaker Voluntary Service; and NEYM committees have also received funding, many of them more than once.

Financially, our goal is to help release Friends to respond to God’s call so that spiritual faithfulness is not dependent on personal financial means. We also ask about and let applicants know of other potential funding sources—especially to help support longer, continuing leadings. The committee’s application review process begins with the Legacy Gift Committee meeting as a whole to let questions for each applicant rise. After that, a two-person review team meets directly with each applicant, along with members of their oversight, anchor, or support committee. Following the visits, review teams bring funding recommendations to the whole committee for discernment. At the end of the funding period, grantees submit reports about where the Spirit took them, how the funds were used, what they learned, and any challenges they encountered and if the ministry or project is continuing. Legacy Gift Committee shares summary reports with NEYM through the newsletter, website, and at the yearly meeting annual sessions.

Clockwise: Ministry on Racial Bias in Policing/Sarah Walton sojourning in Atlanta, Ga., 2016; Maine Poor People’s Campaign, Diane Diccranian (Winthop Center), 2018; Wabanaki Program (Cobscook Meeting & AFSC) 2016; Haven’s Harvest food rescue and recovery program of New Haven, Conn.

During this experiment in holy abundance, we’ve heard about Friends’ experience of these funds prompting and nurturing a deeper understanding and practice of noticing, discerning, holding accountable, and supporting leadings of the Spirit and ministry.

Meetings have shared with us that their understanding of ministry and how to support ministry has grown as a result of engaging with the Legacy Gift program and workshops.

Because engaging in Spirit-led ministry and witness benefits from more than basic financial support, we require meetings to provide oversight, support, or anchor committees for grantees as they engage in the work to which they are called. We also require meetings to serve as fiscal sponsors, and send the grant award checks to them to disperse to the grantee (and to provide any tax forms that may be needed). Ten years ago, many meetings did not have experience in supporting ministry, so we also offer workshops with titles like “Leadings, Meetings, and Money.” We have all learned and grown as a wider Quaker body in our understanding and practice of noticing, nurturing, and supporting witness and ministry among us.

We have planted many seeds that have borne fruit. Over the years the funds have supported a wide variety of ministries and witness activities, starting with the initial priorities of addressing racism and climate change and expanding to encompass further concerns that Spirit has since called us to. Legacy Gift funds have helped send young adult Friends to antiracism workshops, provided racial inclusion and equity training for staff at Friends Camp, funded the Black Quaker Project, and supported Friends in developing racial justice courses. This all contributed to increased awareness and influenced changes in individual meetings and across the yearly meeting as a whole.

Support of climate ministry has helped Friends work with students to document climate solutions in their community. Legacy Gift funds have converted a farm tractor to run on solar energy, created a carbon footprint calculator, and engaged in nonviolent prophetic acts of climate witness. Legacy funding has also helped many meetings, Friends schools, and conference centers install solar panels, energy efficient windows, increased insulation, and sustainable heating systems, thus significantly reducing their dependence on fossil fuels. Adaptations for accessibility, helping small meetings repair roofs, bringing a meeting up to code to provide sanctuary for refugees, peaceful mitigation of beavers who were flooding a meeting’s driveway, and addressing the challenges during COVID were made possible thanks to these funds.

Faithful inreach and outreach efforts have been nurtured by Legacy Gift funds. One grantee developed an online Quaker library and adult Quaker education classes. Others traveled in the ministry of intervisitation among meetings. A meeting member created digital outreach videos for their meeting. Funds helped ministry supporting our living testimonies as one meeting set up a peace center, Friends addressed food insecurity and rural poverty in Maine and another produced a book of art by incarcerated men in Vermont.

Initial leadings have rippled out, with some seeds growing into ongoing ventures like the summer food rescue initiative that has become Haven’s Harvest, a nonprofit keeping tons of food out of the climate-impacting waste stream and into hungry bellies in Connecticut. An individual’s exploration of art as a practice of faith grew into an art camp. A ministry grant to create a dinner church led to the establishment of a new open, affirming Christian online Quaker meeting.

The ministry supported by the Legacy Gift funds has been far-ranging and meaningful. A gathering for women in public ministry that was funded brought together Friends from several yearly meetings. Funds have helped Friends travel to international gatherings, conferences and to an American Friends Service Committee action at the southern U.S. border. Funds helped develop curricula and Quaker books for use in collaboration with Friends’ schools in Rwanda. Funds supported travel for the Black Quaker Project to present their work to the Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva, Switzerland, a health ministry in Mongolia, participation in a Friends Peace Teams training in Poland, a young adult Friend to learn about earth stewardship and responses to climate change in Bolivia, and for a Friend’s ministry of friendship and humanitarian support for the people of Ukraine. Other grant recipients have traveled to Cuba, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and other parts of the US in faithfulness to their leadings.

Clockwise: Traveling ministry with ultimate frisbee to Cuba, Julian Grant (Hanover) 2016; Quaker Dinner Church, Kristina Keefe-Perry (Fresh Pond) 2018; Leadings, Ministry & Money Workshop with Viv Hawkins, Sarah Spencer, Jeremiah Dickinson, Greg WiIliams, and Beth Collea (Wellesley Meeting), October 2016; Faith & Play with African and Latin American Friends, New England Committee of FWCC, 2016.

An emergent priority over the last decade has also been seeking right relationship with Indigenous People. Using some of the funds for reparations was originally proposed during the first years of discernment while setting up the Legacy Gift funding program. The question of reparations was brought to annual sessions several times, in 2012, 2013, and 2014. One minute read that “A Friend noted that the money in this fund comes from the sale of land that ultimately came to us through the Doctrine of Discovery, and asked that we consider the reparations that might be appropriate out of this sale. How does our use of these funds, and indeed of all Yearly Meeting resources, reflect our testimony of integrity?”

These conversations led NEYM to make an apology to Native Americans in 2022. Several Legacy Gift grants have been made in support of nurturing relationships with Indigenous People and doing research into New England Friends’ role in supporting Indian Boarding Schools in the late 1800s. During the 10 year Legacy Gift review process we heard again the call for NEYM to consider reparations. During annual sessions, NEYM approved next steps to initiate a conversation and discernment about restorative actions and future reparations, inviting local meetings to engage in learning and reflection, and report back to annual sessions with yearly updates. If NEYM becomes clear to make financial reparations, a significant draw from the funds gained through the sale of the New England Friends Home may be used for this purpose.

As one Friend shared, “A really important part of the Legacy Gift Funding Program is that it encourages Friends in general and Meetings in particular to live into the life of the Spirit. Witness, Ministry and faithful presence from a perspective of abundance, rather than scarcity, is a necessary shift for all people of faith.”

The fruits of the Legacy Gift funds have been rich, powerful and many. Getting to serve on the Legacy Gift Committee is a blessing and ministry in itself. Meeting Friends across NEYM, glimpsing where Spirit is rising among us, and being able to support faithfulness is a joy! As we journey into continuing the Legacy Gift experience we celebrate the great blessing the funds enable in nurturing the movement of Spirit among us. Perhaps other Friends will be inspired to put funds to use in similar ways to answer God’s call in our time.

Much of this article was drawn from the initial 10 year review report of the Legacy Gift experience, co-written also by Suzanna Schell in Massachusetts (Beacon Hill and Three Rivers Meetings), who clerked the discernment that led to the establishment of the Legacy Funding Program and was the founding clerk of the committee; and Fritz Weiss from Portland (Maine) Meeting, a prior NEYM presiding clerk who served ex officio on the Legacy Gift Committee. This article is written from our experience, not on behalf of nor representing New England Yearly Meeting as a whole. For more information, guidelines, funding priorities and a slide show of grant recipients, see Legacy Gift’s page on NEYM’s website at neym.org/committees/legacy-gift.

Mary Link

Mary Link is a member of Mt. Toby (Mass.) Meeting and clerk of New England Yearly Meeting’s Legacy Gift Committee. Having had inspiring mentors and received informal financial support from Friends decades ago that enabled her faithfulness to leadings in peace witness, Mary finds enormous joy in now being able to support others’ leadings through the Legacy Gift Committee. Contact: legacy@neym.org.

2 thoughts on “An Experiment in Holy Abundance

  1. I’m grateful for the funds that the Legacy Gift Funds provided for three 9-month offerings of the NEYM Nurturing Faithfulness program, held at Woolman Hill retreat center and online between 2017 and 2022. The financial assistance provided by those funds made it possible to offer the program to the seventy plus people who participated over five years, many of whom were supported to grow in faithfulness, skill, and courage in their calls, leadings, and ministries related to undoing racism, addressing climate change, spiritual nurture of meetings and individuals, and much more.

  2. Enjoyed the balance between funding immediate needs, as well as supporting long-term goals.

    Adding charitable beneficiaries (using EIN) to any financial account (retirement, IRA, 401k/403b, life insurance, 529, money market/savings/checking, HSA, broker, etc.) is a very simple and easy way to keep creating new opportunities with funding for both immediate needs and long-term goals. Far less costly than hiring a lawyer for a will or trust, plus funds transfer almost immediately without legal delays.

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