If young people stand up for views that differ from their older community members, there are efforts to punish them so that they might become “respectful community members” all the while disrespecting them at every opportunity. I can name all sorts of cruelty that I’ve faced for basically taking ONE position FIVE years ago at yearly meeting. I can name people who believe that my lack of repentance at that position indicates that I am not “mature” enough to provide valid input.

One fundamental problem is that with a difference of age comes an assessment of capability. If a person who is half the age (or even younger) of someone taking a differing position, their age is directly plugged into a formula of “weight” that tries to function not by Spirit, but by might and by power. And THAT is not how Friends are supposed to work!

I don’t name names because I know from experience that no one’s going to listen to whatever I say. And because some needed work does actually get done sometimes, even in the most disfunctional organization. I have a suitcase of stories of being ostracized when I asked too many “elephant in the middle of the room” questions. Yes, making a fuss gives me “I told you so” bragging rights when it’s all crashed down and been swept under the carpet, but by that time some slick development manager will have mixed together a new batch of kool-aid and everyone will have forgotten the money and effort wasted on the last great idea.

My take is that a lot of the big staff-heavy organizations aren’t sustainable. They’re also not needed in the same way they were in the past. As money has tightened, they’re cranked up the hype and turned ever more attention to a shrinking donor class. Yes, we could name acronyms and tell stories but that would just be two jaded insiders whining and trading snarky barbs.

All this is why I’ve taken a step sideways. The work of QuakerQuaker is different because:

1) It’s not staffed. No development manager, no fundraising budget.

2) It’s easily replicable and not based on any sort of monopoly position. If anyone disagrees with it, they can pay $15 to get their own website. This means it can be opinionated, which I think is the big reason for whatever success it has.

3) It makes no claims to being “the” site for anything. Most of it’s work is sending people to other sites. We link to lots of organizations that don’t link back. That’s okay, no skin off our teeth.

4) If it disappeared or transmogrified into some other sort of entity no one would care. No livlihoods at stake, no property to sell, no assets to fight over.

I don’t just complain. I work with larger Quaker clients in my web consulting business. I regularly talk behind the scenes with staffers at various Quaker acroynms (mostly the younger, lower-level employees). I don’t think the decision-makers fully realize that the economic meltdown only speeded up some major changes in how small nonprofits relate to their mission and supporters. Tightend budgets are the new normal and are only going to get tighter. If we can get through the crunches, I think we’ll find that the internet and a kind of distributed volunteer network can spread the good news of Quakerism farther, faster and more full-bodily than the old model. We’ll see. >>

Chuckfager replies: Well, yes, Martin I’ll cop that you were on the list I had in mind. But maybe not in the way you suspect: your work on quakerquaker (plus the consulting, about which I know less) is going in the direction of the organizational innovators I spoke about wanting to see emerge. Whether it succeeds in institutional terms or not, it’s an important experimental step forward. So props for that.

More names to come, I expect.