On June 17, 2021, QVS hosted our 2nd Annual Supporters’ Briefing. We held our first ever Supporters’ Briefing in summer 2020 to offer Friends an inside look into programmatic and financial shifts due to COVID-19. This year, in addition to a report and recap from the QVS board, we also invited three current QVS Fellows to share about their experience in the program.
Click the video below to watch the recording. Or, scroll down to review the program’s special highlights!
Special Highlights
This year’s Supporters’ Briefing offered us an opportunity to emphasize the numbers that make up our community and impact, and the stories behind those numbers.
We’ve included the slide deck, some recap, Fellow testimonials, and links shared during the event, but for the full experience we hope you will watch the recording above. If you would like to jump to a certain portion of the recording, check out the timestamps to the right of the video. For instance, the three QVS Fellow Testimonials starts at 08:20.
Video Timestamps
00:00 Opening
02:28 Agenda
03:35 Review of 2020-2021
08:20 Testimonials from three QVS Fellows
25:42 Gratitude for Fellow Testimonials
27:00 The Bigger Picture
27:35 Recruitment Trends
30:13 Growing our Alumni Community
31:45 Impact on Service Site Placements
33:32 Impact on Local Friends
35:40 QVS Financials
41:00 Learnings from the Pandemic
45:03 Visioning
48:44 Q&A
1:06:33 Closing
QVS Young Adult Fellows
Program Cities
Site Placement Partners
Friends Meetings & Church Partners
Briefing Slide Deck
Hover over and click on the left and right edges of the slides below to scroll through the slide deck.
Did You Know?
This year, we partnered with 33 total sites, 14 of which were new partners. Our goal is to provide entry points for young adults to explore a wide range of vocational paths. In doing so, Fellows are able to learn from each other and see the ecosystem of service and justice work that they are a part of.
What else is new this year?
We expanded our team! Carol Anne Ferlauto joined our team as our new Alumni Engagement Coordinator to support Fellows transition out of the program, and to nurture our 200+ strong alumni community!
“Stumbling upon the QVS page I instantly felt the spirit and my soul telling me that this was something I had to do. I looked through all of the site placements and knew before I even had any idea where I would want to live that my site placement that I am at now is where I’m supposed to be… And [QVS] has really shaped me and put me on a trajectory for my future life.”
“Living and being in community is like being a part of a living thing… Reflecting on a time of conflict that we had in a house, there was a period where we felt broken beyond repair. Like there was something fundamentally wrong going on. It was this really pervasive feeling that we had once felt such a closeness, or this really unique bond that now was so broken. And in searching within ourselves and within each other, we were able to find a lot of a lot of unconventional ways of healing.”
“QVS helped me interrogate, some of the thoughts that I had about resources and sharing within a community. Like asking my community for monetary resources, asking my neighbor for a spatula or asking someone in the [Local] Support Committee for a space to host an event. I think I was really hiding from asking those questions… wanting to be self sufficient. QVS helped me see my community itself as something that’s really abundant and full of resources.”
Links Shared During the Event
In case you missed any of the links we shared in the chat during the briefing, here they are again.
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- This year, we began spotlighting Alumni stories on our blog and social media. You can find these spotlights on our blog here.
- Check out and download a copy of the QVS Alumni Impact Report here.
- To read about all of our past year’s sites visit our page here.
- We wrote about the role of local Friends on our blog in April of this year. Check it out here.
- Friends Foundation for the Aging is one of our granting partners who has helped us pilot a sliding scale / subsidy modeled site placement fee. You can read more about our initial partnership with them here.
- Want to learn more about the launch of our endowment? Check out our blog post here.
- You can learn about all of our board members here.
- This is where you can give today, tomorrow, monthly, weekly, annually.
- To hear from three Friends and QVS Alumni about why they feel led to support the transformative work of QVS, check out this video.
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Invest in QVS
When you give to QVS you are: empowering young adults to explore their spirituality and vocation; increasing capacity of social change and service organizations; fostering intergenerational connections in Friends meetings and churches; and building new leadership for the Religious Society of Friends and the world.
Consider giving a one-time or recurring gift online today to help sustain our program, or be in touch with us about non-financial or deferred giving options.
For more information about giving or to get connected to one of our program cities, contact Claire, our Development Director, [email protected].