Richmond Meeting is one of 40 Monthly Meetings that make up the community of Friends known as Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM).  BYM is made up of Meetings in most of Virginia, DC, and Maryland, as well as parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania.  We hold our week-long Annual Sessions once a year in the summer along with several one-day Interim Meetings throughout the year to do business together.

Most recently, we had a called Interim Meeting on January 31 to finish some vital time-sensitive business.  There were just two items on the agenda.  The first was to approve the 2026 budget.  This was achieved in a relatively short amount of time.

The second item was a return of the report from the BYM Quaker Camps Governance Study Group.  The report and its associated proposal for restructuring our camps’ governance was presented with an apology for the previous Interim Meeting in November when the proposal was presented without appearing to have addressed concerns raised at threshing sessions and without responding to concerns raised in the face of the Meeting.  Those concerns were then addressed.  The Yearly Meeting was able to then approve the minute for the Yearly Meeting to create an LLC, owned by the Yearly Meeting, to be called BYM Quaker Camps LLC, and that the study group continue working through the next Interim Meeting to assist with the creation of the initial Board of Directors and to draft a resource manual on matters to be considered by the new board.