‘How bold do you want trustees to be, Friends?’ Jonathan Fox, clerk to BYM trustees, asked the meeting on Saturday morning. Responding to some feeling that last year the trustees’ report, and BYM’s opportunity to engage with it, had got rather short shrift, this year it was allotted almost a whole session. Ron Barden, clerk of Quaker Finance and Property Committee, presented a clear if unpalatable message: we ended 2009 in good shape, thanks to a late surge in Friends’ contributions and above-budget legacy income, but the continuing decline in contributions per member and the severe economic outlook mean that we anticipate a deficit in 2010 and 2011.

Taking up the theme, Jonathan Fox posed four questions, heralded in Minute 17 of trustees’ March 2010 meeting, already widely circulated. What sort of Society do we want to provide for in future? Rather than cut the work, do Friends agree with the thrust of trustees’ suggestions, to look for more imaginative ways of carrying out the centrally managed work, to continue to enhance Friends House as an income-generating Quaker venue and to try to lighten the weight of governance? Will Friends help trustees to raise the funds necessary to carry out the vision?

If trustees had been looking for endorsement, as one Friend commented in the later special interest group, they must have been disappointed. Fears of an over-powerful trustee body had, it appeared, not been entirely laid to rest – some Friends worried about the phrase in the report (p30) ‘Trustees … decide the work’ and warned once again ‘things could become hierarchical if we’re not careful’. Other Friends, it later became clear, imagined that a grand refurbishment of Friends House was being proposed, which might exclude civil society lettings. ‘We’re not going five star!’ exclaimed the recording clerk, to general relief.

Other Friends were more supportive. ‘I am aware of Meetings which are waiting for trustees to invite such programme-related investment’, said one Friend. ‘I hope trustees will not be afraid to ask Friends for money when the time comes’. And to the core question, one Friend gave a robust answer, ‘I thought the challenge was for us to be bold, not the trustees. Without vision, the trustees perish, and it’s our vision the trustees need in order to carry out the work for us.’

Rowena is a BYM trustee.