Summary

• The 2022 Gathering will be held online July 3^rd through 9^th. 
• Registration for the virtual Gathering will open in May. Details are coming soon.
• YAY!, an in-person Young Adult and Youth event for children, teens, and young adults (ages 0 – 35) is in discernment. More soon!
• FGC is committed to both online and in-person, all-ages Gathering events in the future.  Planning for the 2023 Gathering in Oregon is well underway. 

Dear Friends,

We are excited that we will be offering a great opportunity to be in community online this summer.  Simultaneously, we are disappointed that we are unable to hold the all-ages in-person portion of the Gathering this year.  While there were a number of issues, we lacked the number of volunteer commitments necessary to ensure we can hold a meaningful, relatively safe and smoothly running in-person all-ages Gathering this summer.  It’s difficult to write these words both because we love the full in-person, all-ages Gathering and because we know this is a disappointment to many of you who dearly love attending the Gathering in-person.  We know you have been looking forward to its return after two tough years of COVID. While we’ve learned the online Gathering is beautiful for many Friends, we know many of you need and want to be in-person. 

Although we know the decision is disappointing to many of you and very much to the Gathering Clerks, the Gathering Committee, and all of the FGC committee members and staff who have put in hundreds of hours on the in-person portion of the event, please know that these hours of work are valuable to the community.  We are grateful for all the effort that has laid the groundwork for future hybrid Gatherings.  There have been an enormous amount of details, policies and guidelines that have been created or recreated over the past year along with many important conversations about issues of equity and access. All of it will help us going forward as a community and the learning will continue as we ramp up for what should be positive Gathering events this summer.  We will also working hard to do what’s necessary to hold, in additional to online Gathering programming, an all-ages, in-person Gathering in 2023 and beyond.

Efforts are being made to convert many workshops from in-person to online.  Gathering staff and youth committees are exploring the possibility of a four day in-person young adult and youth event for children, teens, and young adults (ages 0 – 35). More soon!  Please look for more e-mails in the coming days that will lay out the various details, pricing, attendance guidelines and more.  Until then, we thought it very important to share, broadly, the direction of the 2022 Gathering and the ways we can gather this summer.

For those of you who want to know more about why a number of staff and committee members felt we couldn’t hold an all-ages in-person Gathering this year, please continue here.

Thank you Friends for journeying with us as we continue to navigate these challenging times. 

In Service,

Barry Crossno,

General Secretary

Marvin Barnes,

Presiding Clerk

Lori Piñeiro Sinitzky,

Conference Director