FGC Friends is a feature of our monthly Vital Friends eNewsletter that highlights a Quaker meeting, organization, or individual Friends who work with FGC to nurture faith and Quaker practice. We’re pleased to feature FGC-affiliated Intermountain Yearly Meeting for the month of February.

For this month’s FGC Friends spotlight, we are pleased to be sharing reflections from Intermountain Yearly Meeting. Intermountain Yearly Meeting is comprised of seventeen unprogrammed Monthly Meetings and about a dozen Worship Groups in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Texas, South Dakota and Idaho, containing a total population of about 1,600 Friends. Friends General Conference’s Executive Committee was pleased to hold it’s Winter 2016 meeting at Albuquerque Friends, an IMYM monthly meeting. This year is IMYM’s 40th Anniversary!

Friendly Facts about Intermountain Yearly Meeting:

–        IMYM is excited about their continued work with Mountain Friends Camp. 2016 will be Mountain Friends Camp’s fifth year in operation. The camp has been steadily growing since its inception. 2015 was the first year with family session including younger kids. IMYM is thrilled and appreciative that some of their junior high-senior young adult friends are finding meaning in connections made as counselors for Mountain Friends Camp. Activities are designed by the campers, attenders have enjoyed morning meeting for worship; plork, work that supports maintaining the camp, done in the spirit of play; a half day of silence ends with giant parade with noisemakers.

–        IMYM has been reflecting on right relationship with indigenous peoples. Member meetings, like Boulder Friends Meeting, have been doing strong work around the issue and leading IMYM as a whole to examine the topic more fully. In 2014 IMYM minuted their approval of the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples.

–        IMYM is embarking upon the third year of a new structure for all of their committees. As a volunteer based organization without any paid staff, IMYM has restructured to allow for a broader distribution of workload, avoiding volunteers donning too many “hats” and allowing for wider engagement from members. IMYM is pleased this new structure has allowed for new committees as well, namely a Peace and Service Committee, and a Delegates Committee.