Pacific Yearly Meeting (PacYM) is both a community of Friends and an organization through which our community carries its work together throughout the year. Its foundation is the Monthly Meetings, which are the primary communities for regular worship, fellowship, and shared life among Friends. Pacific Yearly Meeting offers a wider circle in which Friends can worship and build relationships across that local experience, serve the larger community, and attend to concerns that extend beyond any one Meeting.
The life and work of the Yearly Meeting continue throughout the year through the service of officers, committees, representatives, staff, and many other Friends, carrying responsibilities from spiritual care and discernment to finance, communications, youth programs, recordkeeping, and relationships with the wider Quaker community.
Once each year, Friends come together for Annual Session, where we worship and spend time together, consider matters requiring the discernment of the whole body, and conduct the business of the Yearly Meeting. Mid-Year Sessions provide another regular opportunity for worship and business, especially for matters needing attention between Annual Sessions or further seasoning before coming to the whole body. When something urgent cannot wait for either session, the Presiding Clerk may call a meeting of the Representatives Committee.
Our organizational structure is intended to support that shared life rather than become an end in itself. The sections below describe how Meetings are connected, how PacYM’s structures change as needs change, and how Friends share in carrying that work.
How the Meetings are connected
Pacific Yearly Meeting includes Monthly Meetings in California, Nevada, Hawaiʻi, and Mexico City. Meetings in California and Nevada are also affiliated with one of two Quarterly Meetings — College Park Quarterly Meeting or Southern California Quarterly Meeting. The Quarterly Meetings are independent of the operational structure of Pacific Yearly Meeting and bring nearby Friends and Meetings together for worship, fellowship, regional activities, and their own business.
Meetings that are not affiliated with a Quarterly Meeting connect directly with Pacific Yearly Meeting, which charges Ministry Committee with their care. This includes Mexico City Meeting, Honolulu Meeting, and other Friends communities in Hawaiʻi.
Monthly Meeting Representatives
Each Monthly Meeting names one or more Friends to serve as its representatives to Pacific Yearly Meeting. Representatives help maintain the connection between the local Meeting and the wider Yearly Meeting by bringing concerns, questions, and perspectives from their Meeting into PacYM conversations and carrying information about Yearly Meeting activities and discernment back to their local communities.
Representatives are especially encouraged to participate in Mid-Year Sessions and in fall and spring listening sessions called by the Presiding Clerk. These sessions provide an opportunity to hear what is rising in the Monthly Meetings — where there is energy, concern, need, or interest — and to carry those perspectives into Yearly Meeting discernment, programming, and planning for Annual Session.
A structure that changes with the work
Pacific Yearly Meeting has never treated its organizational structure as fixed. From its earliest years, Friends have asked what forms are needed to support the life and work of the community, and whether existing committees, roles, and practices still serve that purpose.
From its beginning in 1947, PacYM understood its organizational structure as something meant to serve the life of the community rather than become fixed machinery. The founding Organization Committee wanted to avoid “burdensome organization” and expected that the structure would change as the Yearly Meeting’s “organic life develops.”
PacYM’s committee structure has also changed as the nature of its concerns has changed. In 1959, the broad Peace & Service Committee was divided into separate Peace and Social Order committees as the range of concerns expanded. Nearly forty years later, after the work of the two committees had increasingly overlapped, Friends brought them back together as the Peace & Social Order Committee. In 2026, that committee became the Peace & Social Action Committee.
When discernment takes time
In the late 2000s, Friends had been wrestling for several years with how to provide more consistent support for children, teens, and young adults across the Yearly Meeting. Much of that work had depended on volunteers, and the results varied widely from year to year. A proposal for a paid Youth Programs Coordinator raised real questions about cost, institutionalization, and whether employing someone was the right response.
In 2009, Annual Session approved the position as a three-year experiment. The program began in 2010, with regular reporting and evaluation built into the trial. As the work developed, Friends discovered that the Coordinator’s most valuable role was not simply to organize events, but to serve as a resource, connector, interpreter, and catalyst — strengthening relationships and helping ideas find the people and organizational homes where they could grow.
After evaluation and further discernment, PacYM confirmed the position in 2013. The committee originally created to supervise the Coordinator also evolved, eventually becoming today’s Youth Programs Coordinating Committee, with responsibility for a much broader web of youth and intergenerational work.
For many years, PacYM’s central pastoral and spiritual-care committee was called Ministry & Oversight. Beginning in 2017, Friends spent several years reconsidering whether that name still described the committee’s work. The word “oversight” had also become troubling for some Friends because of its historical association with slavery and the use of the word “overseers.” After extended discernment, Annual Session in 2020 agreed to drop ‘Oversight’ from the name, and the committee became the Ministry Committee.
Organizational change does not always mean creating a new committee or renaming an existing one. Sometimes PacYM has found that the work still matters, but a standing role or committee is not the best way to carry it. Subcommittees can give emerging work a place to develop, often under the care of Ministry Committee, while Friends discern what longer-term form — if any — the work may need. These subcommittees can involve a substantial number of Friends and account for an important share of the service roles carried across the Yearly Meeting.
PacYM has also changed the bodies through which its work is carried between Annual Sessions. Earlier structures included an Interim Committee and later an Executive Committee, alongside the Representative Committee. In the early 1970s, Friends explicitly examined how responsibilities should be divided among these bodies and the full Yearly Meeting, seeking to keep routine business moving while reserving significant decisions for the wider body.
In more recent decades, PacYM has periodically undertaken broader reviews of its organization. In 2006, a Year of Discernment asked what was essential to the life of the Yearly Meeting and whether its structures still served that purpose. The 2010 Futures work again examined the relationship between year-round PacYM life, Annual Session, and representative business. In 2012, Friends experimented with ways to make business more worshipful and leave more room for discernment and community. In 2017, a further restructuring and “rightsizing” effort responded to concerns that PacYM’s human and financial resources were being stretched too thin.
Today, the Transformation Subcommittee is continuing this same practice of asking whether PacYM’s forms still serve its spiritual life and the needs of the community.
Changes to PacYM’s standing committees are themselves matters for discernment. Proposals to create, rename, reshape, or lay down a committee are normally seasoned at Mid-Year Sessions before coming to Annual Session for approval.
The same kind of discernment has also happened within individual committees. In 2019, Unity with Nature examined whether its charge still matched the work PacYM needed from it, and how that work could remain grounded in Friends’ spiritual practice.
Over time, some structures have endured while others have been renamed, reshaped, combined, or laid down. Periodic reviews of PacYM’s organization have returned to the same underlying question: Does our structure support faithful worship, discernment, service, and community?
Service in the Yearly Meeting
Much of PacYM’s work is carried by Friends who serve as officers, committee members, representatives, clerks, and in other appointed or volunteer roles.
The Nominating Committee helps the Yearly Meeting discern Friends’ gifts and brings nominations for many of these roles to the body for approval. Other forms of service arise in different ways — through committees, youth communities, staff roles, subcommittees, or particular concerns that develop within the Yearly Meeting.
Service with PacYM gives Friends an opportunity to contribute to the wider community while working alongside Friends from other Meetings and places.
Over time, the number of formal PacYM roles has risen and fallen substantially — from about 50 in 1947–48 to around 250 in the late 1990s, before settling closer to 190–200 in recent years. In the late 1990s, those roughly 250 positions were carried by about 150 Friends. Yet across these very different organizational periods, the proportion of recorded members serving the Yearly Meeting has remained remarkably steady, often around 10 percent.
In other words, service in the Yearly Meeting has never been a marginal activity. Across generations, a substantial share of the PacYM community has taken a turn carrying its work.
Have a memory or piece of PacYM organizational history to share?
Contact historian@pacificyearlymeeting.org