As Co-Clerk of the FGC Institutional Assessment Working Group and Task Force, I am pleased to write with a sense of joy and grace to Friends everywhere that our work has drawn to its natural conclusion as the Implementation Group has been fully formed and is ready to take this work forward. We therefore recently requested to our sponsoring body within FGC, the Committee on Nurturing Ministries, that we be laid down, and they approved that request.

Spirit has moved through us and through our work together since we first came together to seek to create the Institutional Assessment Task Force through its completion and submission of its report to FGC Central Committee.  Some members of the Institutional Assessment Working Group agreed to serve as initial members of the Implementation Group to ensure continuity between the two groups.  The Institutional Assessment Implementation Group was formed through a thoughtful, intentional process of discernment and consultation and we trust the careful work that they are doing to determine our way forward since the Task Force delivered its report to Central Committee.
At its final meeting, the IAWG reached a sense of the meeting that now that the Institutional Assessment Implementation Group is up and running, that the IAWG and the Task Force are ready to pass the baton to the Implementation Group in our collective relay race of which we are all part, towards a shared vision of a future of the Religious Society of Friends rooted in racial justice and more consistent with the precepts of our faith tradition than our lived past has been in reality.

Although our individual work toward our shared vision continues – within ourselves, with one another, within our communities, our families, our faith community, where we live, and among the people whose lives we touch and who are in our spheres of influence – our collective work as the IAWG has concluded and as such, the Committee on Nurturing Ministries has laid us down.