Kerry Nicholson sent us this report:
On Saturday 25th March 2023 members of South Belfast Quaker Meeting met at Frederick Street Meeting House in North Belfast to review and update their Sustainability Plan.
Originally the South Belfast Meeting House was unavailable due to it being booked by an external group, so Frederick Street Meeting House were approached to see if they could host our event, which they gladly did. Subsequently, South Belfast’s Meeting House became available, but it was decided to continue with Frederick Street’s building as an opportunity to build connections between the two Meetings.
The event started with scones, tea & coffee. The scones were made without using dairy products (using vegan alternatives) as a way to get people thinking about food and not take things for granted.
In 2022, the EcoQuaker Ireland group (a committee of Ireland Yearly Meeting) produced a booklet called ‘Regenerating Our Common Home’ to assist Meetings across the island of Ireland work toward Carbon Zero in their Meeting Houses and members lives. This booklet formed the framework for the discussions and work for the morning.
Themes explored included the definitions of sustainability, carbon zero, carbon neutral, and carbon sequestration. Areas examined included premises & buildings, working with younger people, cooperation between different Meetings, finance: cost versus environmental benefit, and speaking truth to power.
In 2016 South Belfast Meeting members developed an initial Sustainability Plan and then updated it slightly in 2021. This event was a chance to review it completely to see what we have achieved, do a bit of blue sky thinking about what else we need/want to achieve, along with encouraging the various committees that operate in the Meeting to consider environmental impacts in their decision making.
We spent time in small groups looking at the different themes and then came back into the larger group to try to bring some structure to the range of ideas.
All this work will now be brought together into a new Sustainability Plan which will be presented to the whole membership of South Belfast Meeting to be agreed (hopefully) as our way forward.
The morning finished with homemade soup some of which was made with vegetables from a local organic farm delivery box scheme, so the food was grown within 10 miles of where it was eaten.