A few days ago, Friends United Meeting sent out the following sad story. If you are not familiar with FUM, you can learn more HERE. New England Yearly Meeting (to which Durham Friends belongs) is itself oner of the member Yearly Meetings of FUM.

October 23, 2025The North American and Caribbean Board of Friends United Meeting write:   Dear Friends, We will put the bad news first: at our current income and expenditure rate, FUM will not have sufficient operating funds to remain open by July of 2026.We understand that this may come as shocking news, and we’re taking some actions to improve the situation. Keep reading to learn more.The Board has been aware of the magnitude of our financial crisis for several months now; in late spring, we were startled to learn that we were not certain we would make payroll. Rather than release bad news in a piecemeal fashion, we took some time to fully understand the problem. We assessed all our various forms of income and expenditures, looked at historical trends to understand how much of our current situation is temporary and how much is an ongoing problem, asked Lloyd Stangeland of Iowa Yearly Meeting to serve as our temporary CFO, and worked to reconcile bookkeeping errors.Over time, overall giving to FUM has risen—especially for designated ministry work. What has not kept pace is support for the Ministry Support Fund, which covers the administrative expenses of FUM’s work. While most of our individual ministries have sufficient funding for themselves, for the past several months our administrative expenses have exceeded income by an average of about $34,000 a month. In the past twenty years, contributions from Yearly Meetings that funded our administrative work have decreased significantly. Individual donations have risen, but not quickly enough to make up the difference. The costs of doing our work have risen tremendously. We also experienced unexpected complications with a transfer between bookkeeping systems, which obscured the seriousness of our financial predicament.We, the Board, are profoundly sorry to Friends for the role our own inaction has played in this crisis. Our audits have not been done in a timely fashion, internal financial controls have been missing, and we did not ensure that good accounting practices were being followed. We have not been careful enough in reviewing financial information given to us or in developing the ability of new board members to understand FUM’s complex financial structure. In response to this crisis, we are taking several steps…   Read the rest of the letter from the Board here (link opens as a PDF). If you have questions, you can use the Contact List below to get in touch with your representatives or other members of the Board. The Board is meeting in a called session on Friday, October 24th, to consider the Fiscal Year 2026 budget. Please pray that Board members will be open to hearing God’s wisdom and able to hear how the Spirit is calling Friends forward.In Peace, Sarah Lookabill Presiding Clerk of the Friends United Meeting Board

Resource Documents (links open as PDFs): Further Financial Information North American and Caribbean Board Contact ListCopyright © 2025 Friends United Meeting, All rights reserved.

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