Windy Cooler and The War For and Against Quakers

Windy Cooler is what is called a "public minister" among unprogrammed liberal Quakers. She is a member of Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting in Maryland and for the last ten years she has worked (under the care of Sandy Spring for the last four) to address interpersonal violence in the Religious Society of Friends. You might know her work as she has traveled extensively in the US carrying her concern for abuse and violence and how we address both. You can read more about her ministry in recent issues of Western Friend and in Friends Journal and you can see her giving lectures at Pendle Hill and as a guest on QuakerSpeak.

Like many or most public ministers in the Quaker tradition, Windy does not earn a regular living from this full-time work, is occasionally provided with compensation, and is sporadically supported with travel stipends and other kinds of support that do not include living expenses. She has no retirement of her own and in fact often self-funds the travel, education, and support she needs to serve and labor with Friends about how we care for one another in times of crisis. When not self-funded Windy patches together support from multiple places in the form of fellowships, small grants and individual people to pay for transportation and conference fees, as well as her own education. This impacts the quality of the work, as the work is impoverished even while it is extremely labor-intensive to develop. This makes the accomplishments of projects like Windy's Life and Power Quaker Discernment on Abuse and the recent collaborative research on the impact of sexual violence on clergy, including Quaker leaders, something of a miracle.

This experience of profound material lack in public ministry is part of the inspiration for Windy's doctoral work at Lancaster Theological Seminary. Windy's doctoral research is called The War For and Against Quakers: Right Relationship and Public Ministry in the Religious Society of Friends. The title is a reference to the lamb's war and it is an autoethnographic account of Windy's time in public ministry with contributions from other ministers in the tradition as well as original research into the history of public ministry among Friends, with insights into how the conflict that split Quakers in the 19th century is alive in how we understand ministry today. Ironically -- this work is unfunded.

Together Windy's attendance at conferences where she has been invited to join her collaborators in the research into the impact of sexual violence on clergy and the travel involved in her doctoral work on right relationship and public ministry will cost Windy $16,000. This is not work that has any natural way of being compensated as it is work done on behalf of the Society generally, not for a particular meeting, and while Windy can apply herself to patching together $16,000 from myriad sources it seems important to bring this back to Quakers generally, in the light, for what it really is.

Please consider donating to this fundraiser to lighten the load placed on Windy as she carries out her call and in so doing improve the final outcome of this inquiry into how we are prepared to show up for each other as Quakers.