Rhiannon Grant asks: what’s the opposite of a Rumspringa?
So my questions for Quakers are: How do you ensure that adults are trusted to be adults even if they are under 30? How do you make sure that people are given opportunities to take responsibility without feeling that they must perform especially well because they are representing a whole demographic?
Here in the U.S., the trick to getting on national committees while young (at least when I was trying it in my 20s) was having a well-known mom. As someone who kept knocking and kept getting turned away it blew me away when I heard Quaker-famous offspring complain how they were always being asked to serve on committees. But then I realized it was the same tokenizing phenomenon, just in reverse.
So our work isn’t just looking around a room and ticking off demographic boxes, but really digging deeper and seeing if we’re representative of multi-dimensional diversities. And if we’re not, the problem isn’t just that we aren’t diverse (diversity is a fine value in and of itself but ultimately just a crude tool) but that we have unexamined cultural practices and selection systems that are systematically turning away people from community participation and service.