Letting Our Money Speak

Quaker Testimonies in an Economy of Greed

Quakers have long been associated with fair dealings and simple living. In part as a result of that reputation, many of their businesses and institutions have been financial successes. 

After more than 40 years with Friends, I have often been able to see the testimonies in work in the financial end of things: as a fundraiser, a treasurer, a trustee, a grant giver, a grant receiver, and, of course, a donor.

My first interaction with finance at Friends Meeting of Washington (D.C.) was at the then-annual bazaar in which the meeting raised the majority of its budget for good works. It was a large operation, and the first time I attended it, I bid on a clock in the live auction for “finer” things. I noticed during earlier bids that people usually wouldn’t bid against Friends. I was fairly new, so there were a couple of forays by others into winning the clock. They didn’t recognize me as one of their own, but they gradually dropped out, and I got the clock for an amazingly low amount. Some years later, I became the co-clerk of the bazaar, and one of the first things I did was switch to a silent auction in the hope Friends might be persuaded to bid up items or compete. I finally axed the auction section entirely as a nonstarter. We raised more by just pricing things and letting people haggle. Competition was not part of our system.

Over the years, the meeting was a veritable whirlwind of money being used with simplicity, for peace, with integrity, in support of community and equity, and with an eye to stewardship of what we had. Thousands of dollars came from individuals to support the meeting and its programs. One program is Funds for Suffering, which paid fines and bail of members who were penalized for stands of conscience. Another is the Personal Aid Committee, which sends birthday and get-well notes, organizes rides and food for members and attenders, and provides occasional interest-free loans. Recently, small stipends have been granted by the Peace and Social Concerns Committee to support members’ ministries, such as postcard writing for the nonpartisan Get Out The Vote campaign that I felt led to lead. The committee also recently supported a young adult friend traveling to the Middle East to bear witness.

But the monetary cyclone does not stop with support of internal activities. Friends provide nearly two thousand sandwiches annually, partnering monthly with the Salvation Army as part of the Grate Patrol to feed the hungry. Friends give school supplies each September to students at a D.C. public school. And in a decades-long partnership with the World Bank, the meeting has provided thousands of shoeboxes with warm clothing items every December, and now also offers an equal number of backpacks for people in homeless shelters. Books and small games for children are in their backpacks.

The community’s partnering multiplies the work to support equity. The Mary Jane Simpson Scholarship is a great example of economic growth in a Friends’ economic sphere. The scholarship began with $1,000 per year being given to one student who graduated from a D.C. public school. The committee wanted to help more students so the fund now includes Friends from Bethesda (Md.) Meeting and Langley Hill (Va.) Meeting. Now more funding goes to six to ten students over four years; the students are also matched with a personal mentor. Our scholars, chosen from a population with a 10 percent or less graduation rate, have, with our help, an 80 percent or better graduation rate from a four-year program, albeit not always in four years.

However, money is defined not only as a method to trade value but also a method to store value. One of Friends Meeting of Washington’s largest holdings is its meetinghouse, first built in 1930 to provide a meeting that welcomed all Friends when there were two Baltimore Yearly Meetings—one was part of Five Years Meeting, now Friends United Meeting; the other belonged to Friends General Conference. The meetinghouse has been a place where advocacy and action has been centered for decades. It has been an incubator for organizations and ideas such as Friends Committee on National Legislation, School for Friends daycare, the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, and the Washington Peace Center. During World War II, tons of clothing were sorted, sometimes mended, and then shipped to American Friends Service Committee for overseas relief.

The meetinghouse was pivotal in many critical events in D.C. In January of 1974, it was where the last draft resister of the Vietnam War era was arrested. It was the place from which hundreds of demonstrations and rallies went forth including Black Lives Matter rallies, climate events, and Middle East war protests. The physical presence of the meetinghouse on Florida Avenue in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, is a real value to Friends.

I was not at the meeting when they decided to buy Quaker House in 1970. The minutes of the meetings where decisions were made reflect real concern over incurring debt. They celebrated some years later when they burned the mortgage after years of faithful payment. 

When I was meeting treasurer in the mid-1980s, the furnace failed. Many elderly Friends did not attend in the summer because of the oppressive heat. While some Friends considered air conditioning frivolous, I presented this opportunity to combine air conditioning with the new heating system as a way make the space more welcoming in the summer heat. The cost of the air conditioning was a real concern but was greatly minimized by combining it with the cost of replacing the broken furnace. A Friend, who no longer attended in the summer heat said, “If we decide we need it, the money will be there.” We did, and it was. Weddings in July were suddenly possible!

At the end of the last century, after years of lackluster care of Friends Meeting of Washington’s two buildings—the meetinghouse and Quaker House—the meeting increasingly understood that it was not using one of their greatest assets to its fullest potential. Centrally located, in walking distance of the White House and the National Mall where so many demonstrations occur, it offered many benefits. A seed was planted to make it more energy efficient and more accessible (at one place, you had to step down one step, cross a sidewalk, and climb three steps to reach the sloping backyard).

The problem—besides agreeing on the design—was, of course, the cost. There was no question that what we were looking at was millions of dollars. But the structure needed care, repair, and updating.

The need for more investment in our building was clear to many. The ability to pay for a multimillion-dollar project was not. After nearly ten years of discussion, the meeting approved the renovation plan based, in part, on a business plan that included renting event space (weddings, bar mitzvahs, and television interviews). Seven years after that, the newly renovated building was lovely, comfortable, and very sustainable with solar panels and a green roof with beehives where honey is produced to help pay for their new home. Ramps and an elevator—not to mention leveling the yards to the same level as the floors in the building—have made it possible for everyone to get to almost every room in the buildings. New floors were added, as well as tasteful decorations, including information about various Friends, such as Bayard Rustin and Gordon Hirabayashi, to educate those who come into the space. 

This glorious place, the renovated building, had an open house on October 19, 2019, to welcome Friends and potential renters to the new space and to launch the events and rental outreach that would help pay the huge mortgage that came with the renovation.

We don’t look too closely when examining the ultimate sources of our wealth as a meeting and community. And we ignore the question about where our plastic tables and chairs will be dumped when they are no longer usable. All of our financial good works are just a drop in the economic ocean. What’s a meeting to do?

Then 2020 happened. 

Author David Foster Wallace told this story in a commencement address in 2005:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

That lack of recognition is the problem, isn’t it? We convince ourselves that we are doing good. We are being fair in our dealings with others. We are as green as possible, composting the meeting’s scraps and growing a green roof near solar panels and the bees. However, our actions exist within the water of world economics.

The plan to pay the mortgage by renting out the space for events was stymied by COVID and the lockdown. We had to rely on our investments as a larger part of the answer to the mortgage dilemma. 

We live to an extent on legacies from Quaker families which came to do good in the Americas and did well, in part because of labor from exploited persons. These funds continue to grow with our careful stewardship in Friends Fiduciary Corporation, where they are invested along Quaker principles. 

Many Friends feel that investments are contrary to integrity and equity. Others would suggest that investments are rarely for peace and simplicity. Nearly all investments make profits on the sweat equity of labor. Capital earns nothing on its own. It is hard not to invest in companies that do not have dirty hands of some kind.

Friends Fiduciary Fund’s solution to this dilemma is to be an active investor: it encourages the McDonald’s Corporation to end child labor in their restaurants and Amazon to respect workers’ rights. It encourages AbbVIE to provide more affordable drugs and Texas Instruments not to produce items that can be used in weapons. But can you say you invest equitably and with integrity when each of these companies have executives being paid tens of millions of dollars salary annually, which in some cases is more than 2,500 times the minimum wage that some of their staff are paid?

I am not shaming Friends Fiduciary or saying what they are doing is wrong. They are doing what they intend and are paid to do: invest Quakers’ and others’ wealth to sustain and grow it, and also use it as leverage for corporations to do less evil. And they have done a wonderful job for Friends Meeting of Washington based on those goals.

Ultimately, the problem is with the economic system. As Pamela Haines said in her Pendle Hill Pamphlet Money and Soul, the economy, once primarily based on mutual support, is now based on greed.

In the good old days of June Cleaver, vacuuming wearing high heels and a simple strand of pearls, and of George Bailey being saved by all the people he helped in his honest and fervent way, mutual support was more the norm. But the real difference came from the tax system, which taxed income over $250,000 (an equivalent today of $2.9 million) at the top rate of 92 percent—not the 35 percent of today. The Texas Instruments CEO’s salary alone—​​ one of the lower salaries— would be $16 million minus $2.9 million exemption, times the 92 percent tax rate; that would pay about $12 million in tax revenue under inflation-adjusted 1953 tax laws.

Back in the day, that money paid for a lot. For education, roads, bridges, care of parks (and keeping them free), military and economic aid for other countries, and so much more. All those things that made it the “Good Old Days.”

Today, we are encouraged to embrace consumerism, “self-sufficiency” and, ultimately, greed. We don’t look too closely when examining the ultimate sources of our wealth as a meeting and community. And we ignore the question about where our plastic tables and chairs will be dumped when they are no longer usable. All of our financial good works are just a drop in the economic ocean. What’s a meeting to do?

James Baldwin wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” As Virginia Sutton, a member of Friends Meeting of Washington, once said many years ago. “God is the clerk of the results committee. All we are called to be is faithful.” We must be as faithful as we can be in this water in which we live.