Quaker Blog

Welcome Message from new CYM Secretary Cameron Fraser

Cameron Fraser has just taken on the new role of Canadian Yearly Meeting Secretary.

Greetings Friends!

I am exceptionally enthusiastic about beginning this role, and warmly greet you as Canadian Yearly Meeting (CYM) Secretary! The beginning of this role is a new chapter for CYM and myself. I have worked as a public school teacher and principal for the last fourteen years, and am deeply grateful to turn my energy and work toward supporting my faith community.

I had an opportunity to connect with Friends at the beginning of the summer while attending CYM Representative Meeting (Rep Meeting), Camp NeeKauNis as a representative of Education and Outreach Committee (E&O), and Friends General Conference (FGC) Gathering. I felt incredibly supported by Friends at Rep Meeting; the process seemed to lay the grounding for the commencement of my role as Secretary.

I travelled from Rep Meeting to Camp NeeKauNis to connect with the Young Friends and Young Adult Friends (YFYAF) to communicate E&O’s commitment to supporting them along their spiritual journeys in a manner that suits them. I was greatly impressed by the number of Young Adult Friends in attendance, as well as their commitment to their spiritual community. YFYAF engaged in a number of Meetings for Worship for Business and were incredibly grounded in their approach and decisions, which included a deep commitment to building community.

I then travelled with a delegation of Young Adult Friends down to Niagara Falls, New York, to attend the first half of Friends General Conference Gathering. The conference was inspiring both on an operational front and as a community gathering. I made a number of significant connections with Quaker administrators, and took note of practices that CYM might utilize and/or learn from.

I returned home to Victoria, British Columbia, where I spent the rest of July enjoying summer with my young family. My wife Angela and I have two children, Ilia and Bryn, ages six and four respectively. Our family loves tent camping, as well as water and wheel sports. We spent a few weeks camping on Vancouver Island and visiting lakes, beaches, skateboard parks and bike parks.

I began my role as Secretary August 1, and have been working with Elaine Bishop, Mentoring Clerk of CYM, and Kerry MacAdam, CYM Office Administrator, to orient myself to the world of CYM. My overall mandate is to “foster growth and deepening of Quakerism within” CYM. This includes supporting CYM and Canadian Young Friends and Young Adult Friends. I look forward to building closer bonds with Meetings and members of CYM and collaborating with Education and Outreach and Finance Committees, Lorraine Burke, the CYM Bookkeeper, and other CYM Committees as way opens. My orientation will include a trip to Ottawa to meet with Kerry and Lorraine to work on how we build a collaborative CYM staff, while I am working in Victoria, and they in CYM’s Ottawa office. I am especially excited about building toward CYM 2018 in Barrie, Ontario.

I will be working closely with the Clerks’ Committee, my formal oversight committee, to set priorities, direct my energy and maintain a sense of the pulse of CYM. The Clerks have had a special concern about effective flows of information throughout CYM, so I will be working with Kerry to support this. I look forward to working collaboratively with Kerry to support CYM administration. The CYM Clerk(s), Kerry and I will regularly communicate to keep one another abreast of CYM concerns and operations as well as to ensure there is no duplication of efforts.

The establishment of a CYM Secretary is not changing the role that Kerry has so ably performed for the past 20 years. Kerry will continue to field most administrative questions, and will forward to me any correspondence needing my attention. I can be reached directly by email at .

I want to express my appreciation, in advance, to Canadian Friends for their patience and understanding as we move forward developing this new role, which may involve the prioritizing of requests.

I very much look forward to working with everyone to strengthen Canadian Yearly Meeting and our faith community!

In service,
Cameron Fraser
Secretary
Canadian Yearly Meeting
Religious Society of Friends

CLOSED: Call for Proposals: Canadian Yearly Meeting Editor

Canadian Yearly Meeting (CYM) is calling for proposals for a contractor to edit The Canadian Friend and to upload materials to our website, quaker.ca. CYM is a religious organization of Quakers (Religious Society of Friends) in Canada.

This is a maternity replacement for our existing contractor. The contract begins in September, with a period of overlap with the existing contractor anticipated until early October. We hope that both contractors will be able to work together on the fall issue of The Canadian Friend. Appointment will be for one year.

The contractor will solicit material, edit and produce three issues of The Canadian Friend (CF), to appear throughout the year. Working with an editorial committee, the contractor will set editorial direction for The Canadian Friend. The contractor will receive requests for advertising in The Canadian Friend and communicate with advertisers. The contractor will work in InDesign, and send the issue of The Canadian Friend to the printer, as well as creating a PDF version to be posted on the website. Past issues of The Canadian Friend can be viewed at quaker.ca/resources/the-canadian-friend.

Material from The Canadian Friend will also be used as content on quaker.ca, our website.

The editor will solicit and receive additional content to be posted on quaker.ca.

The editor will also use our Facebook presence to post information about material in The Canadian Friend, upcoming deadlines, and quaker.ca posts.

Quaker.ca is a WordPress multisite web page, with public-facing and private sections. Maintenance of the public site will include posting materials, updating contact information, and other updates as requested. The private sections of quaker.ca consist of internal documents and committee web pages. The contractor may be asked to post materials, or to provide technical support to committees posting their own materials.

The contractor is responsible for providing space, software and hardware required for the work, including InDesign, image processing abilities (such as resizing and cropping photos for web use and print), and internet access.

The contractor should have demonstrable experience with InDesign, WordPress and the production of print and/or on-line magazines. Experience with unprogrammed Quaker meetings, particularly within CYM, is desirable. Previous experience or training in journalism, editing and social media is an advantage.

Deliverables:

  • three issues of The Canadian Friend per year.
  • regular posting of materials for quaker.ca, to be posted twice weekly on a schedule mutually agreed upon by the editor and Publications and Communications committee.
  • regular posting of new material on the blog for quaker.ca (at least 2 posts per month).

Production of The Canadian Friend will be paid for up to 100 h per issue. Web editor work is expected to be 10 h / month.

This is a one-year contract. Work is to be invoiced monthly, and will be paid at a rate of $35/h by the CYM bookkeeper following approval by the Clerk of Publications and Communications Committee.

To apply, please send a letter outlining experience and interest in the position, with resume and any other supporting information. Questions and applications may be sent to .

Applications should be received by Monday, July 17, 2017 by 5PM Pacific Time.

Shortlisted candidates will be contacted by Friday, July 24, 2017, and notified of the final results by September 1, 2017.

Welcoming Cameron Fraser as CYM Secretary

Canadian Yearly Meeting (CYM) is delighted to welcome Cameron Fraser as its first CYM Secretary.

Cameron is a member of Vancouver Island Monthly Meeting and lives in Victoria. His background is in education, counselling and organization design and development. He has been working as the Principal at Pender Islands Elementary Secondary School in the BC Gulf Islands.

Cameron has served on Quaker committees including Education and Outreach Committee (E&O) and Agenda Committee at last year’s Canadian Yearly Meeting-in-Session.

The CYM Secretary is a pivotal role, responsible for supporting and enhancing the work of CYM Clerks, staff, and various committees. The Secretary will also work with Young Friends to develop appropriate resources and structure for youth engagement and outreach.

Cameron will start work in this position on August 1, 2017. He will be based in Victoria but also travel to work from the Ottawa office on occasion. Cameron plans to attend Representative Meeting in June, representing E&O.

Welcome Cameron!

For more details please see a welcome letter from the CYM Mentoring Clerk, or the CYM Secretary job description.

Call for submissions: The Canadian Friend

Calling all Canadian Quakers to submit artwork, articles, poetry, reflections and news for the next edition of The Canadian Friend!

The theme for our upcoming spring/summer issue is ‘Faith in Action’.

  • What is the role for faith during the troubled times in which we are living?
    Is there a special quality to activism motivated by God / a leading / love?
    What does scripture / Quaker writings / Quaker experience say about taking action on social and environmental justice?
    Have you had a personal experience of being spiritually moved to act on an issue or injustice?

If you are moved to submit something on this theme – or to send something entirely different – please send in your submission by June 15 to: .

If you have questions about what to submit, be inspired by The Canadian Friend back issues or contact me for details.

Camera-ready advertisements also most welcome.

Thank-you,
Reykia Fick
Editor, Quaker.ca and The Canadian Friend

‘Quaker Concern’ through the decades

Quaker Concern has a new website – and a long and rich history reporting about Friends’ service work via the Canadian Friends Service Committee (CFSC).

Quaker Concern then

The oldest copy of Quaker Concern still in the basement of Friends House in Toronto is Volume 2, Number 3, dating from 1976. It’s shocking to see that the cover story of this issue, about logging and mercury contamination in Grassy Narrows in northern Ontario, is still relevant today.

Canadian Friends Service Committee (CFSC) was founded in 1931, uniting Friends from the then three different Yearly Meetings in Canada to work collectively on shared concerns of peace, integrity, equality, simplicity, community, and respect for all creation. The Quaker Reporter was established to report on the service work Friends did within CFSC, and in 1975, the publication was renamed Quaker Concern.

Articles from the earliest Quaker Concern reflect active threads within CFSC’s program work today. Canadian Friends Service Committee (CFSC) continues to support the long struggle for justice as mercury continues to poison the people of Grassy Narrows. The Ontario and federal governments have finally made promises about remediation work to address the remaining mercury, and we must continue to hold them to account for these promises.

Quaker Concern now

In other articles from this 1976 issue we read about Friends’ concerns for peace internationally and for the treatment of people who have committed a crime. We see a powerful letter written by someone incarcerated in Toronto’s Don Jail, discussing the importance of social justice and positive change before reconciliation can truly be achieved. CFSC’s work continues to centre around criminal justice, peace, and Indigenous Peoples’ human rights, with a focus on themes like reconciliation.

We continue to send a print copy of Quaker Concern to more than 2,000 people in Canada and 18 other countries. We have now added a website quakerconcern.ca to help share Quaker Concern with a wider audience.

It is fitting that the first issue of Quaker Concern on the new website features an article by Murray Thomson, who also had an article in Quaker Concern in 1976. It is a testament to Friends’ quiet and steady work for positive change. This work has achieved so much, yet it is fragile, and can easily be eroded as the conditions for just peace turn into conditions of injustice and war. So CFSC’s work remains important, and we thank everyone who has been a part of it.

Submitted by Matthew Legge in his role as Communications Coordinator for CFSC.