Friends Meeting House Fund doesn’t just help meetings buy meetinghouses, the fund has been helping Quaker meetings across the US and Canada renovate, update, and make their meeting houses environmentally friendly. Storrs Friends Meeting is one such meeting. They recently redid their parking lot with assistance from the Friends Meeting House Fund. Support from the fund allowed them to make their meeting more accessible to people with disabilities by adding handicapped parking spaces and an even parking lot surface, and enabled them to “go above and beyond town regulations to enhance our drainage so that the stream is not harmed by storm water run-off and the erosion, sand, silt, and pollution associated with it.” Friends General Conference is always excited to hear what great projects meetings are able to do with help from the Friends Meeting House Fund.

For 60 years FMHF has supported Quaker meetings through loans, granting over $4,600,000 to more than 200 Quaker Meetings in 18 yearly meetings in that time. Friends Meeting House Fund is proud to provide support and expertise for renovating, building, updating, or greening a meetinghouse, all areas many meetings have likely had to consider. Board members of the Friends Meeting House Fund possess expertise in a variety of real estate disciplines and can support meetings with their expertise in terms of architecture, green building, and management of large projects.

Beyond structure upkeep, FHMF also helps meetings without a permanent home purchase meetinghouses. The Green Meeting House Fund of the Friends Meeting House Fund provides grants to Quaker meetings for environmentally important and energy-saving improvements to their meetinghouses.

Operating as a mortgage pool, FMHF welcomes loans (with interest) from Friends and meetings, thereby creating a fiscal resource which in turn can be loaned to Quaker Meetings for their meetinghouse projects. Contributions to the Grant Fund from Friends and meetings with resources to spare are also welcome and help to nurture small, less well-endowed meetings. Grant Fund donations are tax deductible!