a closer look at the quaker process

beauty & simplicity:

a closer look at the quaker process

by Trustees Rob Lippincott and Rory Eakin, Board Co-Clerk Maureen McAvoy, and SFFS Director of Community Engagement Guybe Slangen

Quakers are known (and sometimes misunderstood) for many things. For example, they are pacifists, they worship in silence but are also vocal activists, and they also make decisions based on consensus as opposed to majority rule. As an independent Quaker school, San Francisco Friends School is built on and governs itself in this Quaker tradition. Quaker tradition informs daily life in our school and how we make decisions as a community. In this issue of Among Friends, we wanted to share more about the Quaker decision-making process and highlight a few examples of how that decision making process brings our Quaker values to life in meaningful ways.

Quakerism (more formally known as the Religious Society of Friends) is a Protestant, Christian movement that began in England in the 17th Century. In its early days, Quakerism faced opposition and persecution. However, it continued to expand, extending into many parts of the world, especially the Americas and most recently in Africa. Today there are estimated to be 300,000 active Quakers around the globe.

Early Quakers revered simplicity in dress, action, and speech. Now archaic “plain language” included the use of thee, thy and thine in place of you, your and yours. They believed so strongly in equality, they addressed even nobility or royalty in this familiar way—sometimes to their peril, losing a tongue, their freedom, or their very lives. They were also widely viewed as pacifists, rooted in the radical Peace Testimony of 1660, the legal recognition of Conscientious Objector status, and their ongoing lobbying and demonstrations against war and gun violence.

Our school adopts these broader Quaker traditions in our Quaker Testimonies: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship (SPICES). We have also adopted the practice of Meeting for Worship, a weekly opportunity for the community to gather in silent reflection. ––––––––––

Quaker Decision Making Process

Similar to the Meeting for Worship, Quakerism utilizes a Meeting for Business as a general forum for decision-making, tapping into many Quaker beliefs and practices to reach a shared outcome.

Meetings for Business begin with a period of silence, providing a moment for reflection and grounding before issues are raised. “Claiming a moment” provides a pause before individuals start in on their discussion and discernment.

As Quakerism stresses equality, traditional meetings have no positional authority from title or tenure. Central to the process is the belief that “there is that of God in everyone,” (Note: many schools today, including SFFS, use Light or Inner Light here instead of “God”). Leaders are clerks of meetings, not chairs, and they attempt to guide the collective body toward unity.

A core tenet of this process is that truth stands outside of any one individual and only through the ongoing sharing of and listening to individual perspectives does one get closer to the “correct” path. Quakers believe in a concept called continuing revelation, a process where truth evolves and emerges over time.

The process of threshing, sharing opinions and seeking to separate the “wheat from the chaff”concerning the issue at hand, helps a deliberative body of individuals find the right path forward to a unified decision. Since no single person holds the “truth,” every person shares their lens into the truth to help the body as a whole discern the most effective course for the collective.

At some point, the clerk looks for a “sense of the meeting” to reach unity. This consensus is not reached by a vote, nor does it equal unanimous agreement. Importantly, the group as a whole can reach consensus on a decision even while specific individuals have different individual preferences, as long as the individuals concede to the decision-making process of collective discernment.

The meetings conclude with members signaling their support for the collective decision with a verbal “I approve.” This is not a vote. It is an individual affirmation of the final decision reached by the body overall. And this affirmation is an explicit commitment to support that decision. ––––––––––

Implications of the Quaker Decision Making Process

The process to reach consensus can be laborious. Without a named leader, the meeting may be engaged in the threshing process for considerable time. The process is designed to hear and value all voices, not to make an expeditious decision.

The goal is to facilitate a durable decision. As Michael Sheeran describes in Beyond Majority Rule: Voteless Decisions in the Religious Society of Friends, the Quaker decision process puts a burden on those participating not only to voice their input, but also to accept the outcome as their own. Participants are asked to voice input, then let their personal opinion go, as the sense of meeting forms. There is no concept of bitter dissent after the decision—“I voted the other way” —since the decision was made in community, after sufficient threshing.

Without the sense of unity, no decision can be made. In practice, this may mean the Meeting is paused to allow a deeper consideration during an extended period of silence. Or it

THE HEAD SEARCH

The Trustees of every independent school have a broad set of responsibilities, paramount among them the selection and retention of an effective Head of School. Hiring in any organization is vitally important—but also inevitably fraught. As with much of the Board’s work, we leaned on our school’s Quaker values and decision-making to ensure a thoughtful and thorough process resulting in a durable decision. To do so, we needed to ensure all voices were heard, leading to selection of the candidate best suited for the next steps in our school’s journey with a strongly unified and collective outcome.

• Clearly reflecting the Quaker process for decision-making was the composition and conduct of the Search Committee led by two respected and experienced trustees, Shabnam Koirala-Azad and Ed Chung and composed of trustees, professional staff, and parents, representing three core constituents of our school community. • The committee conducted interviews, town halls, and a survey to gather input from the community on goals, aspirations, and concerns, and to specify “what we value most about SFFS.”

They also developed key queries, questions designed to discern whether a candidate could meet our hopes. • After the interviews, the committee met to deliberate, with each member bringing individual perspectives and listening to diverse opinions and concerns, a process also known as “threshing.” • The committee then invited three finalists to the school to allow for a deeper assessment of their interest, impact, and viability.

After carefully polling the SFFS community; probing references; and further threshing input from our community, the committee arrived at unity on our final choice. Throughout the process we remained grounded in and guided by our Quaker values, ultimately landing on a unified, collective decision. may be that the Meeting adjourns for a time, and the topic is revisited at a later date. As a result, the Quaker decision-making processes will move more slowly than more traditional or hierarchical alternatives. Skilled clerking is vital to helping the community reach a decision point. A recent thought piece from current parent and Trustee, Rory Eakin, summarizes the model in an immediately relevant way for current business practice. ––––––––––

The Quaker Decision-Making Process at SFFS

From Kindergartners to grown-ups, San Francisco Friends School uses Quaker decision-making throughout the organization, though not exclusively. Many decisions are made by faculty and administrators each week through delegated responsibilities and authorities given to roles throughout the school.

Many of the daily workings of SFFS are conducted or governed through Quaker principles. The Board almost exclusively uses Quaker decision-making for its work, perhaps reflecting the broader mandate and greater remove from daily decision-making—and we do see Quaker decision-making show up regularly throughout the community.

Three recent examples include:

• The Head of School Search:

The Search Committee, appointed by the Board of

Trustees, followed the Quaker

Decision-Making process in the selection of our new Head of School (see sidebar for more detail on this process).

• 8th Grade: 8th Grade clerks facilitated a Meeting for

Business to determine their grade’s section names. Over the course of a few weeks, they sifted through dozens of suggestions along with strongly held opinions to land on a final outcome. As one of the 8th Grade clerks, Paxton, shared: “Unity is a very important part of a meeting for business and our schools’ quaker values. What does unity mean? It’s being united or joined as a whole. A large part of decision-making at any level at the Friends School is trying to be as close to unity as possible.”

• Kindergarten: Our Kindergarten teachers lead their students through a Meeting for Business in an effort to figure out how to effectively share classroom materials. The process and results transformed the way students engage with each other.

These three examples, ranging from selecting a new Head of School, the single most important decision made by our Trustees, to a much more immediate, but no less important set of decisions in our Kindergarten and 8th Grade classrooms, highlight the way Quakerism guides our community, complete with a demonstrated comfort with the dynamics and the language of the Quaker decision-making process.

The Quaker decision-making process is not a rigid set of rules to be followed with strict procedure; instead, it is a decision framework always evolving with the community, grounded in equality, trust, and stewardship. As our school grows, we will continue to seek out stability in the unity of purpose and action. •