Well since Kwakersaur is inaugurating the “I don’t have anything to post”:http://kwakersaur.blogspot.com/2005/06/i‑dont-have-anything-to-say.html meme, I’ll chime in that I don’t either. Actually I’ve written two and half essays but realized they’re both really for myself. This is how it happens sometimes. I’ve long noticed this phenomenon in fully-formed verbal ministry that I know I’m not supposed to deliver and it feels as if such restraint is sometimes healthy on the blog. The message will reappear in other forums I’m sure, most likely next month’s “Gathering workshop”:www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/strangers with Zachary Moon.
In the meantime, there’s been fresh talk about plain language and dress this week by “Johan Maurer”:http://maurers.home.mindspring.com/2005/06/plain-language.htm, “Claire Reddy”:http://Quakerspeak.blogspot.com/2005/06/simplicity-unfocused-thought-blurt.html and the “Livejournal Quakers”:http://www.livejournal.com/community/Quakers/105292.html. Russ Nelson’s started a “Planet Quaker”:http://planet.Quaker.org/ blog aggregator (which includes Quaker Ranter: thanks!). LizOpp talked about “field testing”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2005/05/after-annual-sessions.html her upcoming “Quaker identity Gathering workshop”:http://www.fgcquaker.org/gathering/workshops/work36.php at Northern Yearly Meeting sessions and Kiara’s talked about “being field tested by Liz at this year’s NYM sessions”:http://wordspinning.blogspot.com/2005/05/northern-yearly-meeting.html (how cool is that?!).
I’ve been geeking out on “Del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/martin_kelley, the “social bookmarking” system and on the esoteric concepts of “tags”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags, the “semantic web”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web and “folksonomies”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy. Two weeks ago I would have laughed at these neologisms but I’m beginning to see that there’s something in all this. The only outward form the regulars will see is a more accurate “Related Entries” selection at the bottom of posts (thanks to “Adam Kalsey”:http://kalsey.com/blog/2003/05/related_entries_revisited/) and better visibility in “selected Technorati entries”:http://www.technorati.com/tag/Quaker (which will get less me-centric as I finish tagging my own back posts).
And of course we’re tilling the field, planting a garden, putting up laundry lines and otherwise thoroughly enjoying the first Spring in our new house. It’s bedtime, off to read the radically folksonomic adventures of Sam and “My Car”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060560452 (it’s pure tags: “My name is Sam.” “This is my car.” “I love my car.” I’d worry that not-so-baby Theo is getting too excited by combusion engines if he weren’t even more excited by “dia-di-calschht” aka the “bicycle” Papa rides off to work on.)
Quaker Ranter
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Tag Archives ⇒ fgc
Youth Ministries 2: What Do Young Friends Want?
April 28, 2005
I was given permission to pass along this data from the FGC-sponsored Youth Ministry Consultation that took place Third Month. A number of goals and projects had been brainstormed beforehand. The thirty-or-so participants at the Consultation were each given ten stars, which they were asked to put next to the projects they thought should be pursued. Every star acted as a vote that there was one person interested in that topic. The stars were coded to indicate the age range of the voter: High-Schooler, Adult Young Friend (18 – 37 years old) and older Friends.
One of the “stars” charts at the consultation |
Being the information design geek, I converted the resultant votes to into qualities and colors and put them into a chart showing interest level. Projects that received no votes from a particular age range are labeled “none,” for no interest; 2 – 3 stars is “weak” interest and so forth, up to “HOT” which are projects which received over 7 stars from an age group.
As an example, take “develop spirituality.” Seven adult young Friends (aged 18 – 37) put a star down for this, indicating they thought it was something FGC should promote, hence “strong” (bright red) interest from this age group. No Friend over forty used one of their stars to indicate interest in this work, indicating that none of them thought FGC should be promoting spiritual development. Here are the results:
High-School Voters | YAF Voters | Older Adult Voters | |||||||
Expecially for Adult Young Friends | |||||||||
Community | weak | strong | weak | ||||||
Develop spirituality | none | strong | none | ||||||
Outreach & how to explain our faith | none | strong | weak | ||||||
Critical mass at MM, QM, YM | none | weak | strong | ||||||
Mentoring by older Friends | none | strong | none | ||||||
Mentoring to younger Friends | none | strong | none | ||||||
Mentoring to older Friends: | none | strong | none | ||||||
Help with transitions | none | *HOT* | weak | ||||||
Advertising programs | none | weak | none | ||||||
Suggestions: | |||||||||
Traveling Ministries for AYF | none | lukew | weak | ||||||
Groups throughout the year for support | none | lukew | weak | ||||||
Support for AYF groups at the YM levels | none | weak | weak | ||||||
Database to help isolated friends | none | none | none | ||||||
Clearness/discernment process: | |||||||||
For HS to College | none | lukew | none | ||||||
For work transitions | none | weak | none | ||||||
For relationships | none | weak | none | ||||||
For parenthood | none | weak | weak | ||||||
Intergenerational Spiritual Conversations | |||||||||
About Vital Friends Issues | none | lukew | none | ||||||
Vision of Quakerism in 50 years | none | lukew | weak | ||||||
Financial support for AYF | weak | *HOT* | lukew | ||||||
Retreats for youth workers | none | none | weak | ||||||
Materials specifically designed for AYF, | none | none | none | ||||||
General Questions: | |||||||||
How do we handle the broad age span? | none | weak | none | ||||||
How do we tap the energy and passion of this group MMs, YMs & FGC? | none | lukew | strong | ||||||
How do we meet the needs without separating AYF from larger community? | none | lukew | none | ||||||
How do we sustain community when we only meet once a year? | none | lukew | weak | ||||||
Especially for High Schoolers | |||||||||
Needs: | |||||||||
Adults who are better prepared to work with them… | weak | lukew | strong | ||||||
FAP�s that have self confidence | none | none | weak | ||||||
Help with discernment process around college | none | none | none | ||||||
Help with disc: C‑O | none | none | weak | ||||||
Help with discernment around life choices | none | none | weak | ||||||
Discernment questions: #3, #4, & #5: | none | weak | strong | ||||||
Building community | weak | weak | weak | ||||||
Networking | weak | none | none | ||||||
Bible study, RE curriculum | none | none | weak | ||||||
Training how one person can have impact | none | none | none | ||||||
Training on how to develop group dialogs | weak | none | weak | ||||||
Help to get more teens involved | weak | none | lukew | ||||||
Programming help | none | none | none | ||||||
Leadership Development | weak | weak | weak | ||||||
Suggestions: | |||||||||
Youth newsletter | lukew | weak | none | ||||||
Email forum | lukew | weak | none | ||||||
Email data base | none | weak | none | ||||||
Event b’ween Young Quakes and Gathering | weak | none | none | ||||||
Youth exchange | weak | none | none | ||||||
Programs to facilitate rites of passage | weak | none | none |
Things Younger Friends wanted more than Older Friends:
In order by AYF popularity:
- MENTORSHIP: The AYFs really want cross-generational mentoring relationships. When the questions were first posed, there only “mentoring by older Friends” and “mentoring to younger Friends.” Check the math and you’ll see that’s the same question (whoever put the questions together forgot that the Quaker understanding of eldership is not necessarily a function of age, hmm). I grabbed a pencil and added “mentoring to older Friends” and it was instantly popular. Even though the mentorship issue was spread over three questions, AYF’s voted “strongly” for each of them, showing terrific popular support. Almost no over-40 Friend voted for this. This is not something that can be forced onto disinterested older Friends, which means I think we young-in’s are going to have to rely on one another for mentorship.
- SUPPORT FOR AYF CONFERNCES: Younger Friends want to spend more time together. Note should be made that the voters were Friends attending a conference and that we were a selected and self-selected group who presumably like to attend conferences. Still, this is popular.
- TALKING ABOUT OUR FAITH: It’s sad that only two older Friends thought explaining the faith was worthwhile. At the same time it’s encouraging that 13 AYFs wanted this. It’s very clear that younger Friends aren’t as afraid of talking about serious faith issues as the Baby Boomers (it’s nice to see some of my essays confirmed!).
Things Older Friends wanted more than Younger Friends:
- TAPPING THE YOUTH: There was what I thought was a semi-obnoxious question about how to “tap the energy and passion” of younger Friends. This is very close to the all-too-common generational mindset that sees “values young people as a resource” (as a ad in heavy-rotation at NPR proclaims). We are not a resource for extraction. Young people are too often seen merely as a source of cheap labor for projects initiated, designed and run by older Friends; they are wanted as passive audience members for older Friends’ pontificating lectures; they are endlessly proclaimed a far-off “future” of Friends rather than the very much here-and-now present of Friends.While older Friends at the consultation felt strongly that young people should be tapped, Adult Young Friends had lukewarm interest in being tapped and high school Friends showed no interest whatsoever. While not all older Friends think of young Friends as “resources,” it’s a common-enough theme that we need to flag it as a part of the generational gap. I suspect that power issues will surface when Quaker institutions try to pull together projects that “tap” youth: twenty-something Friends are going to want more involvement in the design and operation of these projects than older Friends will be willing to give.Similarly, older Friends seem to be more interested that younger Friends attain “critical mass” at Quaker institutions like monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings. The phrasing of the question is a little ambiguous and I see two likely explanations. One is that younger Friends don’t feel they need critical mass to be involved in Quaker institutions and want integrated intergenerational participation rather than “AYF ghettos.” The other possibility (the scarier one) is that younger Friends simply aren’t as committed to Quaker institutions. I suspect the generational differences in responses are the result of both these factors, plus others perhaps.
Things no one particularly cared about:
- No one wants materials specifically designed for AYF. No one wants advertising programs. No one wants a database to help isolated Friends.
- An AYF traveling ministries was lukewarm, 4 YAF stars, 3 over-40. This surprises me.
- Any other patterns that should be lifted up?
Disclaimer
I should note that this was not a scientific survey. Though the organizers of the Consultation tried hard and the participants were surprisingly diverse for an collection like this, they weren’t representative. There were only four high school participants and I didn’t adjust their votes: “lukewarm” support from them should really be relabled “strong” support.
While this is a small sample size, this is one of the few recent surveys of it type in FGC Quakerism and it bears close study. It confirms a lot of what I’ve been saying all these years (yea!, I’m not crazy) and echoes what I hear a lot of high school and twenty-something Friends talking about. Take it for what its worth!
Related:
- I first wrote about the Youth Ministries Consulation in “It’s My Language Now”
FGC Gathering program is up, whew…
March 23, 2005
Thank you to everyone who refrained from commenting after 9pm last night. I finally slogged through the work of putting the FGC Gathering program online in my role as FGC webmaster. Whoo-whee! For those who don’t know, the Gathering is a week-long conference held at different locations each summer: this year’s takes place Seventh Month 2 – 9 in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Now I guess it’s time to think about workshops. Zach Moon and I are offering up one called “Strangers to the Covenant” but then you know that already. Liz Oppenheimer aka the The Good Raised Up is leading one called “Quaker Identity: Yearning, Forming, Deepening” that I suspect will be informed by her “own experience of stepping into a Quaker identity”. There’s also an exciting history workshop being led by Betsy Cazden, “Dilemmas from Our Quaker Past” (I have to admit when I saw the listing I wondered if I should call Zach up and assure him he’d be fine doing the Strangers workshop on his own so I could take Betsy’s). Other mentions: my wife Julie really liked the Lynn Fitz-Hugh workshop she took a few years ago.
As always there are workshops whose leaders I know to be more solid and grounded than the workshop they’re proposing; conversely, there are workshops that sound more interesting than I know their leader to be. Like always there are plenty whose appeal and/or relevance to Quakerism I just don’t comprehend at all, but that’s the Gathering.
Any recommendations from the peanut gallery? I should say that I’d like to refrain from ridiculing all of the workshops that beg to be made fun of. It feels as if this would edge too close to detraction. We will only get to Kingdom by modeling Christian charity and wearing our love on our sleeves.
It’s My Language Now: Thinking About Youth Ministry
March 16, 2005
This past weekend I took part in a “Youth Ministries Consultation” sponsored by Friends General Conference. Thirty Friends, most under the age of 35, came together to talk about their experience of Quakerism.
Conformed to the World
The issue that spoke most strongly this weekend was the experience of not being known. Young and old we longed for a naming & nurturing of gifts. We longed to be seen as members one of another. Early on a young Friend from a well-known family said she often felt she was seen as her mother’s daughter or confused with cousins and aunts. Another Friend with pedigree complained that as a young person interested in Quakerism he was seen by nominating committees as a generic “Young Friend” who could be slotted into any committee as its token youth representative. Another young Friend agreed that, yes, there is “affirmative action for young Friends.”
Affirmative action?!? For young Friends?? At this statement my jaw dropped. Throughout most of my time as a twenty- and thirty-something Friend I have felt almost completely invisible. I’d have to walk on water to be named to a committee by my yearly meeting (only in the last year has a yearly meeting nominating committee-member approached me). I can get profiled in the New York Times for my peace work but request as I try I can’t even get on the mailing list for my yearly meeting’s peace committee!
And yet the deeper issue is the same for me and the annointed young Friends: we are seen not as ourselves but in relation (or non-relation) to other Friends. We are all tokens. As a small group of us met to talk about the issue of gift-naming, we realized the problem wasn’t just limited to those under forty. Even older Friends longed to be part of meetings that would know us, meetings that would see beyond our most obvious skins of age, race and birth family to our deeper, ever-changing and refreshing souls. We all long for others to give nurturing guidance and loving oversight to that deepest part of ourselves! How we long to whisper, sing and shout to one another about the Spirit’s movement inside us. We all long for a religious society where expectations aren’t limited by our outward differences.
This isn’t about filling committees and finding clerks. What if we could go beyond the superficial communities of niceness maintained in so many Meetings to find something more real – a “capital ‘C’ Community” as one Friend put it? This is about living that beloved Community. Consultations and programs are easy but the hard work is changing attitudes and changing our expectations of one another, expectations that keep us from having to get to know one another.
One Body in Christ
As the consultation wrapped up we were given an overview of the next steps: setting up committees, doing fundraising, supporting identified youth work. It’s all fine and good but it was a pretty generic list of next-steps that could have been generated even before the meeting.
Caught up in the idea of a “youth ministries program” are assumptions that the problem is with the youth and that the solution will come through some sort of programming. I don’t think either premise is accurate. The real change needs to be cultural and it needs to extend far past youth. Even most of the older Friends at the consultation saw that. But will they bring it back to the larger organization? Last November I shared some concerns about the Youth Ministries initative with its organizing committee:
I haven’t heard any apologizing from older Friends for the neglect and invisibility that they’ve given my generation. I haven’t heard anyone talk about addressing the issues of Quaker ageism or the the culture of FGC institutional nepotism. At [the FGC governing board’s annual meeting] I heard a statement that a youth ministries program would be built on the ongoing work of half-a-dozen listed committees, most of which I know haven’t done anything for youth ministries.
The point was hit home by an older Friend at the consultation during a small-group breakout. He explained the all-too-familiar rationale for why we should support youth: “because they are an investment in our future, they’re our leadership twenty and thirty years from now.” I suspect that a number of Friends on governing boards – not just of FGC but of our service programs and yearly meetings – look at “youth ministries” in a similarly-condescending, dismissive way, as investment work in the future. Why else would younger Friends be so under-represented in most Quaker committees and program work?
The problems transcend Quaker institutions. But Friends General Conference is in a particularly good position to model the work. Will FGC create a youth ministries ghetto or will it do the hard work of integrating its committees? Will it finally start sponsoring young ministers in its Traveling Ministries program? Will FGC initiate outreach efforts specifically targeted at 20-somethings (the demographic of the great majority of seekers who come to our doors)? Will there ever be a Friend under thirty-five invited to give a major Gathering plenary talk?
Transformed by the Renewing of Our Minds
The consultation was just 30 Friends. Most of the most exciting young Friends I know weren’t even invited and really couldn’t be with such a limited attendance cap. One older Friend tried to sum up the weekend by saying it was the start of something important, but that’s the wrong way to look at it. It’s really only another step along the way, the continuation of work that’s been going on for 100 years, 350 years, 2000 years or more depending on your frame of reference. This is work that will continue to be done over the course of generations, in hundreds of meetinghouses and it will involve everyone in the Religious Society of Friends in one way or another.
Lurking unnamed in the background of the Youth Ministries Consultation is the popular “Quaker” sweat lodge, which became so popular precisely because it was partly organized by young Friends, gave them real leadership opportunities and knew–knew with a certainty–that they could experience the divine and share that experience with their peers. If FGC’s programs can’t match those criteria, then FGC will suffer the loss of yet another generation.
What was important to me were the trends represented. There was a definite interest in getting more deeply involved in Quakerism and in exploring the religious side of this Society of Friends.
Grace Given Us
One struggle we’re going to continue to have is with language. For one small-group breakout, the organizing committee broke issues down by topics. One was dubbed “Leadership Training.” With that moniker it was surely going to focus on some sort of delimited, secular – and quite frankly boring – program that would be based on an organizational design model. It wasn’t the concern I had heard raised so I asked if we could rename it to a “naming of gifts” group; thankfully the suggestion was eagerly accepted. Renaming it helped ground it and gave the small group that gathered permission to look at the deeper issues involved. No one in our small group pointed out that our discussion unconsciously echoed Paul’s letter to the Romans:
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect… For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us. Romans 12.
This unconscious Christianity is very strong among our branch of Quakers. As our small group discussed naming of gifts we turned to the roles of our monthly meetings and started labeling their functions. As the mission statement was worked out point by point, I noticed we were recreating gospel order. I suggested that one was to “forgive each other our trespasses,” which was an idea the small group liked. Even so, a few members didn’t want to use that language.
We were talking gospel order, but with sanitized language; it’s an oddity that we modern liberal Friends turn so often to secular vocabulary: we talk of childhood development models, we use organizational design lingo, we speak in the Quaker committee-speak.
My feeling is that liberal Friends do want to be religious. But we’ve spent a generation replacing any word that hints of religion with secularized alternatives and that now we often can’t think past this self-limited vocabulary. One word that needs to be exercised more is “God.” If you want to be a modern day Quaker minister, just reformulate every secularized Quakerspeak query you see to include “God.” When Friends ask “How can my monthly meeting meet my needs,” nicely suggest that we also ask “How can my monthly meeting meet God’s needs.” I found myself constantly reformulating queries over the weekend. It’s kind of odd that the word “God” has become so absent from a People gathered in the knowledge that “Christ has come to teach the people Himself,” but that’s the Society we’ve inherited and this is where our ministry must start.
Near the end of the consultation one college-age Friend explained a moment when her Quakerism was transformed from outward identity to an inward knowledge. “It’s my language now” she declared to us. Yes, it is. And that’s youth ministry and elder ministry, the good news that there’s a God we can name who will reveal what is “good and acceptable and perfect.” That’s our work today, that is the ministry of our ages.
More Reading:
FGC published a Good News Bulletin about the Youth Ministries Consultation.
FGC Gathering Workshop
January 29, 2005
This fall Zachary Moon and I put together a workshop proposal for the 2005 Gathering, which has been approved: “Strangers to the Covenant” is the title and here’s the short description:
This is for young Friends who want to break into the power of Quakerism: it’s the stuff you didn’t get in First Day School. We’ll connect with historical Quakers whose powerful ministry came in their teens and twenties and we’ll look at how Friends wove God, covenants and gospel order together to build a movement that rocked the world. We’ll mine Quaker history to reclaim the power of our tradition, to explore the living power of the testimonies and our witness in the world.
This was very much an “as way opens” process. At the 2004 Gathering I felt sad that there weren’t more workshops that I’d like to attend. And obviously I have a long-standing concern to support younger Friends. But I wasn’t sure if I had the skills to handle this. One piece of discernment was leading the Quakerism 101 class at Medford Meeting: I knew I would have most of the sessions under my belt by the time the workshop submission deadline came around and I hoped I’d have a feel whether I actually like leading workshops!
The Medford experience was surprisingly good, even on weeks where I could have been better prepared. I learned a lot and gained confidence in “teaching” Quakerism to Medford’s class of very weighty, experienced Friends.
Still, the Gathering workshop submission deadline was looming and I had no specific topic in mind. Julie, my wife, was getting a little suspicious whether the workshop would happen or not. I knew that the most important thing was attracting the right mix of eager, curious participants and that for me the topic was almost secondary. Still: a focus and topic is important, yes.
The week before the deadline, I attended the FGC Central Committee meeting in New Windsor, Maryland, as a staffperson. In a lunchtime discussion I learned that my friend Zachary Moon was also considering leading his first workshop. As soon as we sat down and started talking it seemed like the obvious thing to do. The discernment to co-lead this took two a half seconds or so, but of course this quick process was built on the thought, prayer and discernment both of us had already been giving the matter. I’ve found that when I’ve laid the groundwork for a decision, things can often move suprisingly quickly.
The workshop has developed differently than I suspected. The most signicant piece is its age limitation: it’s for high school and adult young Friends only, meaning it’s participation is limited to 15 to 35 years olds. I’ve always been a little worried about constructing youth ghettos but I think it will work in this case. I apologize in advance to those Quaker Ranter readers who might like to take it but can’t because of age (I’m too old myself, after all!). There will be many other chances to spend time at Gathering and Zachary and I are only a part of a shift that’s been happening at the FGC Gathering over the last few years.
Nonprofit Website Design and Measurement
October 30, 2004
A 2004 Denominational Website Report
When I wrote this in the Fall of 2004, I was working as the webmaster for Friends General Conference, the US/Canadian denominational body for the liberal branch of unprogrammed Quakers. As webmaster, I felt that one of my most important responsibilities was to understand how religious seekers use the internet and how our nonprofit organization could benefit from understanding these patterns.
My 2004 report on the three FGC websites touched on a lot of these issues. I offer it here because I hope it can give other nonprofit and denominational websites some ideas about how to measure their site’s use. Too often we put up websites without any follow-up analysis of their use. You just can’t make an effective website like this and if your work is ministry you don’t want its reach constrained by minor navigational design issues. Please feel free to use the comment page to start a discussion on any of these issues.
State of the Websites
Report for FGC Central Committee, October 2004
By Martin Kelley, webmaster
It’s important to start off with a little editorial about why we need reports like this. We put up a website and we know people use it. Why bother spending time collecting data?
The internet is simultaneously vague and precise. We can say definitively that the FGC website received 114,097 “unique visitors” in the past fiscal year. But how many people does that represent? Is that a high number or low number? How did these users react when they came to the site. Did they think to themselves “whoops, not what I want” and leave, or did they go “wow, what’s this FGC?, hey this is great.” LESSON: We need data to know if the site is being used well.
Everyone who reads this report is by definition an insider. None of us are able to step into the shoes of an unknowledgeable seeker. In my study of usage patterns, I have found that the differences in website use between Quaker insiders and seekers is so great that they might as well be looking at different websites, if not different media altogether (see How Insiders and Seekers Use the Quaker Net.
Because of this gap we cannot design the site based on whims or personal preferences. It is incredibly difficult to imagine how newcomers might navigate the site. We can only consider the design of the site after we’ve examined in usage, both in detail (actual users moving through the site) and in aggregate (pages and links visited over periods of time). See also: How to measure the peace movement. LESSON: We can only effectively design the site if we incorporate sophisticated and detailed data about how the site is being used.
Part 2, Googlization
By far the most significant change in our websites over the past year has been the “googlization” of Quakerbooks and Quakerfinder, both of which now have over four times the visitors they were getting last year.
The Google Problem: Both Quakerbooks and Quakerfinder have had great content from their start. The former lists the entire inventory of FGC’s bookstore, along with book descriptions and reader commentary. The latter has our list of meetings – addresses, worship times, and contact information. But on both sites the bulk of the content was locked up in databases. Before users could benefit from the sites, they had to find them. This limited much of the use to people who already know about FGC and our resources. Because internet search engines can’t search website databases (a problem known as the hidden or deep web), they could index only a limited number of pages on these sites and they made referrals on only the most generic search phrases (e.g., “quaker bookstore” “quaker meeting directory”).
We made various changes to both sites (technical details below) that have made them searchable by Google and the other search engines, which now return our sites for very specific search queries, e.g., “Quakers in conflict Ingle” and “Quakers Poughkeepsie”.
A Wider, More Inclusive Audience: What’s great is that this has given us not just a bigger audience, but our target audience. Most of these visitors don’t know enough about how Friends are organized to even know where to look for information. With Quakerfinder and Quakerbooks, we’re now be visible on their terms.
We’re giving them the basic information they’re seeking and we’re doing it when they are actively seeking it. This last point is important. I spend a lot of time watching how people use websites. If you email someone out of the blue with a link to a website, they might follow it but only half-heartedly. They might be doing five other things at the same time and they rarely stay to full use the website’s resources. When someone comes to a site via a search engine they’re much more likely to look around: this is the visit that they are initiating because they have something specific they’re trying to find.
Having a “googlified” Quakerfinder means we’re actually reaching people who are ready to try out a Quaker meeting and we’re giving them that most basic information that’s often hard to find. With a searchable Quakerbooks we’re selling books to people who might not even have thought about Quakers as a possible spiritual path. I suspect that both sites are doing more outreach about Quakerism than any of us expect.
Update, 11/29/04: I recently met someone who came to Friends after reading the Quaker entry in Wikipedia. He had gone through the list of religious denominations in the U.S. till he found one that spoke to his condition. In the past month FGC has gotten 57 visitors from Wikipedia.
The Fixes
In the official committee report I tried to steer clear of too many technical details since I wanted people to read it. So I’ll expand on them here on the website version.
Unique Domains: I don’t think it really helped to give Quakerfinder.org and Quakerbooks.org their own domains, at least initially. In last year’s report I noted that most of the traffic to those sites came from the main FGCQuaker.org site and that the separate domains weren’t particularly useful. Now the sites do have their own sort of identity, thanks to the “googlization,” which was a different process for the two sites.
Quakerbooks.org: Visitors to the Quakerbooks.org site are given session IDs to allow us to follow along with them as they make their selections. Since some users don’t allow cookies, this ID sometimes appears in the URL (it appears as something like “?sessionid=1514” appended to the end of the address). Google really hates session IDs because its automated software doesn’t know if the different URLs are different pages (to be indexed separately) or merely different sessions looking at the same page. So Googles just ignores anything that looks like this. The easiest fix is to have the software look to see if the visitor is Google and take of the session IDs (Google is okay with this workaround; I also used this method to allow them to index my Nonviolence.org discussion board.)
Quakerfinder: On Quakerfinder.org, the problem was that visitors had to type in a zip code to get to any of the content. Google’s not that interactive and only follows links. Until recently, it thought there was only three pages to the site. To fix this we set up an alternative way to navigate the site: from the homepage you can now follow a link to lists of Quaker Meetings by state. The zip code lookup is so much more convenient that we don’t suspect many live people will look up by state, but Google will and because of this it now lists 808 pages on the site. Now Google acts as a alternate lookup service, one that doesn’t depend on people finding our site beforehand.
Part 3, Comparing the Sites
Visitors
The basic measure used to measure website traffic is that of the “unique visitor,” which counts user sessions. Here are this year’s comparisons to last year’s. Numbers represent the monthly average “unique visitors” to each of our three websites.
Site FY 03/04 total FY 02/03 total Increase FGCQuaker.org 114,097 82,747 38% Quakerfinder.org 48,084 23,964 100% Quakerbooks.org 69,924 19,332 262%
The last two sites have truly remarkable jumps. The numbers are a little misleading, however, as the increase in traffic hasn’t been gradual but sudden and climbing. Compare the last full month (September 2004) with the same month the previous year and all three sites have higher jumps.
Site Sept 04 Sept 03 Increase FGCQuaker.org 9459 8254 15% Quakerfinder.org 8782 1997 340% Quakerbooks.org 7498 1611 366%
While the internet grows in use every year, the increases on Quakerfinder and Quakerbooks represent a quantum leap over that incremental increase. They represent “search engine optimization” of those sites, or what we all refer to the “googlization” of the sites.
Links:
One way of measuring the visibility of a website is to count how many other webpages link to it. Here are
Site October 2004 October 2003 Increase FGCQuaker.org 496 396 25% Quakerfinder.org 196 46 326% Quakerbooks.org 151 96 57%
For comparison: Quaker.org is up to 11,900 links, Phila. Yearly Meeting is 248, PendleHill.org is 420, FCNL.org is 10,200, Nonviolence.org is 20,900 and AFSC.org is 21,800. See Miscellaneous & Notes at end to see how numbers were obtained. See How Can We Measure the State of the Peace Movement? for more on this method of measurement.
Part 4, The FGCQuaker.org Site
Visitors
Use of FGCQuaker.org continues to grow at a good clip. We have a 38% increase this fiscal year compared with last’s. The site received over 114,000 unique visitors from October 1, 2003 to September 30, 2004.
To the right is the chart showing unique visitors by month for the past three years:
Referrers: Where did visitors come from?
In September 2004, there were 9459 “unique visits” to the FGCQuaker.org site, still our most-visited site. Here’s where they came from.
1021 from Quakerfinder.org. One surprise this year is the jump in Quakerfinder-referred visits. This is due of course to the phenomenal visibility of that site. In a recent one-month period, FGCQuaker received 983 visits from Quakerfinder links, two-thirds of which came from the “googlized” Quakerfinder pages. About one in ten visitors are now coming to FGCQuaker through Quakerfinder. Up 288% from last year.
842 from Google. We get a lot of Google traffic because we have a lot of content on our site: dozens of pamphlets, years worth of FGConnections, large parts of the old Fostering Vital Friends Meetings resource binder. Visitors via search engines often don’t know FGC exists but they want to know about our programs and work. Because FGC does such great work (and because we publicize it online!), many of our resources answer questions people have. I think this is great outreach.
Here’s an example. This Spring I noticed that we were getting visits on fairly generic searches for racism. Here’s a list of search inquiries that brought people to the CMR pages on FGC:
“ending racism”
“racially diverse communities”
“quaker racial diversity”
“diversity in friends”
“ethnic diversity”
“responsibilities to racism”
“pastoral care racism”
“activities for ending racism”
“testimonies racial unity”
This is a fascinating list precisely because these are generic searches. People aren’t looking for “Quakers ending racism,” they’re looking for anyone “ending racism” and Google is bringing them to us (we’re number 6 on that search term). This is surprising: I would think the much bigger denominations would all have committees ending racism that would come up higher just because of their larger institutional clout. That we are so high suggests that this work is not as common as I we might hope and that Friends might have the opportunity to play a role in larger faith dialogues.
When people use search engines, they get results from all over the FGC website. Searches might pull up some four-year article on FGConnections, or one of the “Friends And…” pamphlets that we’ve put online. Google up 12% from last year. There were about 83 more visits from regional Google sites.
434 from Quaker.org. Most of these people are coming directly from the Quaker.org homepage to the FGCQuaker.org homepage. I estimate that about 60% of these visitors leave the FGC site without clicking on any links. They’re probably just superficially curious about us, but not enough to look around the site. Up 39% from last year.
253 from other search engines: 118 from Yahoo (118), MSN (74), AOL (42), Ask (19).
81 from Beliefnet. Beliefnet has a popular “Belief-o-Matic” quiz that will magically tell you what religious faith you should join. It’s rigged in such a way that a lot of people unexpectedly come up as Quaker. The qui zthen directs people to an information page on Friends, which includes some links to FGC. Most of the Beliefnet visitors are coming from that information page directly to the FGC homepage. Up 200% from last year.
69 from UVa’s Religious Movements site. This is a pretty good description of Quakerism
60 from Quakerbooks. Our own bookstore website attracts a lot of new people who aren’t part of the established Quaker networks and many of them first learn of FGC this way.
53 from Religious Tolerance. A popular website from a Canadian Unitarian that profiles religions..
52 from QuakerInfo.org. This is the Philadelphia Quaker Information Center, a joint project of a number of Quaker organizations, including FGC.
Where did people go?
Top Destinations in September 04:
* To the homepage: 2396;
* Library’s “Welcome to Quakerism” pages: 463;
* A&O “Resources for Meetings”: 320 (prominently linked from Quakerfinder);
* Gathering pages: 309;
* “Silent Worship Quaker Values” tract on the Library section;
* Gathering’s pictures from last year: 149;
* Religious Ed: 149;
* FGConnections articles: 129;
* Ideas for First Day School”: 127;
* Advancement & Outreach homepage: 124;
* Young Quakes: 118;
* Publications: 100;
* Development 97.
These are pretty typical numbers. The only significant variation over the year comes in Spring, when traffic to the Gathering pages goes up. In May 2004, 961 people visited the Gathering homepage, and 355 visited the workshop listings.
Forget the Aggregates: How Do People Use the Site?
So far I’ve looked at tallied-up numbers: how many people visited, how many pages were looked at. The problem with this sort of statistic is that it doesn’t give us a feel for how individuals are actually using the site. Looking at usage explodes the preconceptions that many of us “Insider Quakers” might bring to the web.
The first lesson: most people don’t come into our site via the FGC homepage. Even more shocking: close to half never even see the homepage!
This blew me away when I first realized it. We spend so much time designing the homepage and wondering how we’re going to direct seekers from it but a lot of this work is in vain.
Of that 45% or so that enter the site via the FGC homepage, most of them leave the site immediately without following any link whatsoever.
Let’s splice this another way: 70% of the people who hit our site (wherever they enter) don’t look at any page other than that first one. They don’t click on anything but the back button.
What are some of the lessons on this: one is that content is all important. Those majority of visitors who bypass the homepage to parachute directly inside the site are coming for specific information. Many of them don’t know anything about FGC and most of them don’t care to learn about FGC the organization. They’re looking for some specific piece of information on Quakers (“painting of Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society Quakers” and “Quakers prison reform”), or on religious education in general (“religious meeting”), or on how churches are dealing with racism (“racial diversity” and “do blacks worship with only blacks”). These are all search phrases that have brought visitors to FGCQuaker.org. So it’s great that we have our pamphlets online and FGConnections and RE materials and A&O brochures.
There are hundreds of pages on our site, most of which we probably forget are there, but Google knows them and will display them up when the query is right.
Another lesson is that we shouldn’t rely on our homepage to help visitors navigate. We shouldn’t even worry much about using how its design will work for both insiders and seekers: most of the seekers never even go there. Most of the people coming to the FGC homepage are looking for FGC the organization.
Committee Page Case Study: One committee, Advancement & Outreach, is considering redesigning their committee page. In preparation I’ve looked at the usage and I think it makes a good case study. The A&O committee gets the most visible link on the FGC Homepage (top left, it gets this position because the committee list is alphabetical). Despite this prominence, almost no visitors actually follow this link. Only 1.5% of visitors to the FGCQuaker.org site ever get to the A&O homepage and even at that it’s the most visited committee page on our site!
Most of the visitors that did get to the A&O page
left without clicking on anything. It is safe to say that most of those
visitors didn’t thoroughly read through the page. The most-followed
link is the first one, for the “Inreach/Outreach” review. In the one-month period I examined only 9 people followed this link! This doesn’t mean A&O material isn’t used: Quakerfinder is very successful and the pamphlet “Resources for Local meetings” is popular. And over 300 people in this month came to some part of the A&O site. Committee pages are useful for the relative trickle of Quaker insiders who visit the page, but we should focus more on the content committees are producing.
The lesson is clear: visitors are primarily looking for 1) good useful content from the “Quaker Library” resources and 2) practical information about the Gathering. Pages about committees and internal FGC workings are not well used. We need to continue the focus on practical resources. We also have to accept that people will not be looking at what we think they should be looking at. Through these visits we will slowly build up FGC’s reputation but many people only dimly know what they’re looking at.
What I didn’t say in the report
In my official FGC report, I only hinted at the differences between institutional websites and focused online new media sites.
One surprising find that didn’t make it into the report is that the three most-viewed pages on my own Quaker Ranter site were seen by more people than all but the two most-viewed FGC pages. The most viewed pages on FGCQuaker are the homepage and the Welcome to Quakerism page. Three of the pages on “Quaker Ranter” are seen by more people than any other page on the FGC website. FGC’s Religious Education and Advancement and Outreach and Publications pages all are more obscure than my homepage or my “resources on plain dress” directory.
Institutional websites by their very nature have too many conflicting audiences and too timid a voice to act as much more than a reference resource. The Friends General Conference website is probably more friendly to seekers than most other institutional websites out there but even it gets a lot of people hitting the “back” button as soon as they hit the homepage.
Religious seekers are looking for individual voices with something to say and I suspect new media seeker websites will only become more important as time goes on. I suspect this will come as a surprise to institutional insiders as it happens. Sort of relatedly, see my Peace and Twenty-Somethings for some of the generational aspects of this shift. My Books and Media section collects similar sorts of essays.
One more piece in this: the FGC websites didn’t get a lot of blog traffic. If all I were was the webmaster of Friends General Conference, I’d assume that all this blog talk in the media was hype. But as the “Quaker Ranter” I know that a popular blog and/or personal site can get a lot of readers. The lesson here is that there’s little cross-over. Blogs seem to send little traffic to institutional websites and vice versa (actually institutional websites can’t really send people to bloggers for a variety of reasons). I’ve had a number of people read my blog and declare they’ll be coming to the next FGC Gathering so I know personal blogs can help raise organization profiles but that interest doesn’t manifest itself as an immediately-followed link. I suspect the community being formed by the blogs is far more important than the raw number of referral links.
Part 5, Quakerbooks.org and Quakerfinder.org
Quakerbooks.org
The first of our two sites to be “googlified” was Quakerbooks.org. I had long hoped to have our book listings show up on the search engines, especially since we carry a lot of hard-to-find ones. I had opened up the discussion board of my peace site to Google and been happy with the results.
Back in early 2003 we installed new software by Steve Beuret to power the bookstore website, one that would allow easy transfer of information between the website and our inventory program. The website could now list whether a book was in stock, and orders would go directly into the system (no more retyping them!). Once the new system was running smoothly, I emailed Steve about optimizing it for Google. There were two parts to this: having the books show up (Steve) and linking them in such a way that Google would index them properly (me). It took awhile to get ito all working but on December 17, 2003 Google came through and indexed the site.
The most visited pages are the introductory ones:
- Welcome to Quakerism
- Becoming a Member
- Basics for Everyone
The search phrases that are bringing in visitors used to be generic (“quaker bookstore”) they now are very specific. September’s list is typical:
- crash by jerry spinnelli
- Andrew Goldsworthy
- celebration of discipline
- the misfits by james howe
- rufus jones
I knew we’d show up high in the Google rankings for obscure books but I’ve been pleased that we’re right up there with Amazon and Barnes and Noble even with mainstream books.
Our online best sellers are pretty
- Grounded in God: Care And Nurture In Friends Meetings
- Friends for 350 Years
- The Quaker Way
- Philadelphia Faith and Practice
- Listening Spirituality Volume 1
- Silence and Witness
- The Journal of George Fox
The bookstore inventory software is not very good at pulling marketing statistics. While it’s very good at telling us what books have sold and what books need to be reordered, it won’t tally up things by type of sale (phone vs. web vs. mail-order). The bookstore report should include more information on actual web sales.
Anecdotally it appears as if about half our web orders are new customers. Many of them are from geographic areas which are not traditionally Quaker. A&O has produced a flyer which goes into orders for new customers.
Quakerfinder.org
After we saw how successful the “googlization” of Quakerbooks was, I thought we should try it for Quakerfinder. It took a little seasoning to get everyone on A&O to sign off on the project but I am delighted to say they saw their way clear. The result has been nothing sort of amazing. Use of the site has grown by 340%. But the actual numbers are even more important: by my best estimate, over 6000 a month are using Quakerfinder who would not have even found the resource if we hadn’t made it search engine friendly. That’s 72,000 people a year – twice FGC’s membership, and these are the EXTRA people coming. Altogether at our current rate, this site is being used by over 100,000 unique visitors. Even if only one in ten of them make it to a Meeting, that’s a lot of people.
In last year’s report I pointed out that most of Quakerfinder’s traffic was coming from the FGC site. At that point, it didn’t looking like giving the location look-up utility it’s own domain name was paying off in any tangible way. Now it’s clearly worth it. Just the extra 600 or so visitors Quakerfinder is throwing to FGCQUaker.org site makes it worth it! Horray!
Twenty Times the Google-Linked Visits: I compared two typical months, one before and the other after the “search engine optimization.” In May 2004 Quakerfinder received 241 visitors from Google searches (footnote 1). In September, it received 3813 visitors – that’s over twenty times the visits. Overall visits almost tripled, from 2292 to 6037, with 60% of those extra visitors directly attributed to the Google bounce. The chart to the left shows daily Google-referred visits since the middle of March.
More Than Just Google: Other search engines were affected too: all together search engine visits went from from 311 in May to 4134 in September. For those interested, the top five search engines for Quakerfinder traffic are:
- Google.com 83%
- AOL: 5%
- Google Canada: 3%
- Yahoo: 1%
- Comcast: 0.8%
As you can see, Google far overwhelms everyone else, which is why we often just call this “the googlization” of Quakerfinder!
Part 6, Miscellaneous and Notes
Miscellaneous
Mailing Lists
Late in the fiscal year, we purchased bulk email software. No, we’re not going to try to sell Viagra or a new home mortgage. This program will help us get information out to our bookstore customers and committee lists. Our occasional bookstore emails (“Book Musings from Lucy”) have been very well received, with only a tiny fraction of recipients asking to be taken off the list.
Web Host Changes
A big project, though not very exciting, is that we’re changing our web hosting company. FGCQuaker.org is with the new company (OLM) and Quakerfinder.org and Quakerbooks.org will be moving shortly. The new company organizes our accounts better and we hope that their service is better. (We’d recommend avoiding Data Realm also known as Serve.com.)
Notes
Programs I Use to Collect Stats:
- For overall numbers, I used a extremely-common program called Webalizer, which gives useful monthly summaries.
- For details I used a program called AXS Visitor Tracking Program, which lets me watch individual users as they navigate the site. With AXS I can also get details on where visitors to specific pages come from.
- I have a list of key words which I watch on Google; every few weeks
I record where our sites stand on those phrases and watch how
navigational changes I make affect our Google rankings. - I also use Google to see what other websites are linking to us. I
look at what they link to (often not our homepage) and how many sites
there are linking. - I also follow links using more specific search engines such as Technorati, which indexes blogs (“web blogs” or personal diary-like sites).
Measuring Links:
I use Altavista’s search engine to measure how many links a site has. For good reasons, Google doesn’t list obscure websites and also counts how a site’s links back to itself. Here’s a sample Altavista query:
Unique Visitors:
The most standard measure of website usage, here is a definition: “A real visitor to a web site. Web servers record the IP addresses of each visitor, and this is used to determine the number of real people who have visited a web site. If for example, someone visits twenty pages within a web site, the server will count only one unique visitor (because the page accesses are all associated with the same IP address) but twenty page accesses.”
We Quakers should be cooler than the Sweat Lodge
July 5, 2004
I have just come back from a “Meeting for Listening for Sweat Lodge Concerns,” described as “an opportunity for persons to express their feelings in a worshipful manner about the cancellation of the FGC Gathering sweat lodge workshop this year.” Non-Quakers reading this blog might be surprised to hear that Friends General Conference holds sweat lodges, but it has and they’ve been increasingly controversial. This year’s workshop was cancelled after FGC received a very strongly worded complaint from the Wampanoag Native American tribe. Today’s meeting intended to listen to the feelings and concerns of all FGC Friends involved and was clerked by the very-able Arthur Larrabee. There was powerful ministry, some predictable “ministry” and one stunning message from a white Friend who dismissed the very existance of racism in the world (it’s just a illusion, the people responsible for it are those who perceive it).
I’ve had my own run-in’s with the sweat lodge, most unforgettably when I was the co-planning clerk of the 2002 Adult Young Friends program at FGC (a few of us thought it was inappropriate to transfer a portion of the rather small AYF budget to the sweat lodge workshop, a request made with the argument that so many high-school and twenty-something Friends were attending it). But I find myself increasingly unconcerned about the lodge. It’s clear to me now that it part of another tradition than I am. It is not the kind of Quaker I am. The question remaining is whether an organization that will sponsor it is a different tradition.
How did Liberal Friends get to the place where most our our younger members consider the sweat lodge ceremony to be the high point of their Quaker experience? The sweat lodge has given a generation of younger Friends an opportunity to commune with the divine in a way that their meetings do not. It has given them mentorship and leadership experiences which they do not receive from the older Friends establishment. It has given them a sense of identity and purpose which they don’t get from their meeting “community.”
I don’t care about banning the workshop. That doesn’t address the real problems. I want to get to the point where younger Friends look at the sweat and wonder why they’d want to spend a week with some white Quaker guy who wonders aloud in public whether he’s “a Quaker or an Indian” (could we have a third choice?). I’ve always thought this was just rather embarrassing. I want the sweat lodge to wither away in recognition of it’s inherent ridiculousness. I want younger Friends to get a taste of the divine love and charity that Friends have found for 350 years. We’re simply cooler than the sweat lodge.
And what really is the sweat lodge all about? I don’t really buy the cultural appropriation critique (the official party line for canceling it argues that it’s racist). Read founder George Price’s Friends Journal article on the sweat lodge and you’ll see that he’s part of a long-standing tradition. For two hundred years, Native Americans have been used as mythic cover for thinly disguised European-American philosophies. The Boston protesters who staged the famous tea party all dressed up as Indians, playing out an emerging mythology of the American rebels as spiritual heirs to Indians (long driven out of the Boston area by that time). In 1826, James Fenimore Cooper turned that myth into one of the first pieces of classic American literature with a story about the “Last” of the Mohicans. At the turn of the twentieth century, the new boy scout movement claimed that their fitness and socialization system was really a re-application of Native American training and initiation rites. Quakers got into the game too: the South Jersey and Bucks County summer camps they founded in the nineteen-teens were full of Native American motifs, with cabins and lakes named after different tribes and the children encouraged to play along.
Set in this context, George Price is clearly just the latest white guy to claim that only the spirit of purer Native Americans will save us from our Old World European stodginess. Yes, it’s appropriation I guess, but it’s so transparent and classically American that our favorite song “Yankee Doodle” is a British wartime send-up of the impulse. We’ve been sticking feathers in our caps since forever.
In the Friends Journal article, it’s clear the Quaker sweat lodge owes more to the European psychotherapy of Karl Jung than Chief Ockanickon. It’s all about “liminality” and initiation into mythic archetypes, featuring cribbed language from Victor Turner, the anthropologist who was very popular circa 1974. Price is clear but never explicit about his work: his sweat lodge is Jungian psychology overlaid onto the outward form of a Native American sweatlodge. In retrospect it’s no surprise that a birthright Philadelphia Friend in a tired yearly meeting would try to combine trendy European pop psychology with Quaker summer camp theming. What is a surprise (or should be a surprise) is that Friends would sponsor and publish articles about a “Quaker Sweat Lodges” without challenging the author to spell out the Quaker contribution to a programmed ritual conducted in a consecrated teepee steeplehouse.
(Push the influences a little more, and you’ll find that Victor Turner’s anthropological findings among obscure African tribes arguably owes as much to his Catholicism than it does the facts on the ground. More than one Quaker wit has compared the sweat lodge to Catholic mass; well: Turner’s your missing philosophical link.)
Yesterday I had some good conversation about generational issues in Quakerism. I’m certainly not the only thirty-something that feels invisible in the bulldozer of baby boomer assumptions about our spirituality. I’m also not the only one getting to the point where we’re just going to be Quaker despite the Quaker institutions and culture. I think the question we’re all grappling with now is how we relate to the institutions that ignore us and dismiss our cries of alarm for what we Friends have become.
Plain Quaker Dressing at FGC
July 3, 2004
As we got onto the campus of UMass Amherst to help set up for this year’s FGC Gathering, Julie & I realized that this is the first time we’ve been to this venue since we started plain dressing (last year we stayed home since Julie was very pregnant). FGC Friends tend to turn to the Lands End catalog for sartorial inspiration. Hippie culture is another font, both directly as tie-die shirts and in muted form as the tasteful fair-trade clothes that many older Friends prefer. Because the Gathering takes place in July and in sporadically air-conditioned buildings, people also dress for summer camp – khaki shorts & once colorful faded t‑shirts are the de facto Gathering uniform. In this setting, just wearing long pants is cause for comment (“aren’t you hot like that?!”) Try broadfalls and a long-sleeve collarless shirt, or a long dress!
So I’ve decided to write down all the conversations or questions I get about my dress this week. I should mention that I actually prefer curious questions to the strange staring I sometimes get. So here we go:
- While ringing up a Gathering store order: someone I’ve known for years asked me whether my clothing was “a theological statement or if it was just comfortable.”
- While troubleshooting the store computers and answering a cellphone call from the office: compared to a literary character named “Cosmic Possum,” who was described to me as someone able to seemlessly live in both the past and modern world (at the time the reference was made I was working two computers and taking a cell phone call.
- Walking by the dining hall, an older Friend called out “Looks good!” I said “Huh?”, he replied “that’s a good outfit!”
Monday:
- “Nice outfit” again, this time from Nils P. As soon as he said it I warned him that I was keeping this log and that he should expect to see himself in it.
- I talked a little bit about dress with a friend from Baltimore Yearly Meeting, a gay Friend involved with FLGCQBC who is identifying more and more as conservative and thinking about going plain. One concern he raised was avoiding sweatshop labor. (I pointed out that plain dress is a cottage industry and that the seamstresses are usually local and believers.) He also doesn’t want to look “like a farmer” as he walks around the city of Baltimore. (I talked about how I have limits as to how plain I go and don’t want this to be a historical outfit but one which people might actually be able to see themselves adopting. I also talked about how I still want to identify on some level with urban anarchist culture, which has a sort of plain aesthetic.)
Tuesday:
- An extended conversation with a bookstore customer from California. She began by asking if I’m doing plain dress for the same reasons as another plain dresser here, who I’ve seen but not met yet. We began talking about motivations and what it’s like and how it is for women, especially who lead active lives. I talked about my wife’s Julie’s practice, which includes leotards when she’s working at a gymnastics coach. We also talked about different kinds of QuakersIt was a great conversation.
- While sitting on a bookstore couch blogging: “You’re looking very distinguished here, with facial hair and susspenders. Is this what married life does? You’re looking very Quakerly. Does thee also have a hat?”
Wednesday
- I spent sick mostly in bed…
- I did have a brief, fever-fed conversation with some of the other plain dressing youths and soon-to-be plain dressing youth. It’s not about dress, but about being Quaker and about how we live as Friends.
Thursday:
- I had an extended conversation with a couple who run the Equal Exchange table about plain dress, Gohn Brothers catalog and avoiding sweatshop-made clothing for union-made clothing. There’s a lot of people interested in this and the issues really connect with simplicity and justice issues.