Background

Bethesda Friends Meeting has met in the Meeting House of the Sidwell Friends Lower School at the corner of Edgemoor Lane and Beverly Road in Bethesda, Maryland, since sometime in the 1960s. In September 2015, Sidwell Friends School (SFS) announced plans to move the SFS lower school from Bethesda to a site adjacent to the upper school campus at 3720 Upton Street NW, Washington DC.

As a result, Bethesda Friends Meeting entered into a period of discernment to determine where our future home will be. Sidwell Friends School extended a warm invitation to move with them to the Washington DC campus, and that is one possibility that was considered. The Meeting community was committed to exploring all possible future paths and possibilities via an open, caring Quaker process that held all members of our community in the Light as we found our way forward.

To facilitate the discernment process, the Meeting established the Ad Hoc Committee on Opportunities for Our Future (AHCOOF) at the November 2015 Meeting for Worship for Business.

• The purpose of this ad hoc committee was not to make specific recommendations, but rather to help our community arrive at a Sense of the Meeting by gathering and sharing information and by organizing sessions for information dissemination, worship sharing, and threshing.
• The full charge of the ad hoc committee can be found HERE.
• Members of the committee were: Marion Ballard, Alex Bell, Peirce Hammond, Susan Kaul, Gail Kohanek, Jabez McClelland, Doug Smith (clerk), Ralph Steinhardt and Amy Lear White.
• Click here to read the final report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Opportunities for Our Future, dated 12/4/2016.
  

This web page was set up to provide the Meeting community with information on Sidwell Friends’ plans and on the options being explored by the meeting, and to provide additional avenues for members of our community to communicate with the ad hoc committee and with each other.

Below are some archived documents that may be of interest