Welcome to BHFH’s new Program Manager, Emily Savin!

Big news in the life of the Friends House: BHFH has hired its first-ever Program Manager!

We’re very excited to welcome Emily Savin, who will start work on Monday, October 29. Emily is a Quaker, a writer, and a community builder coming to the Friends House from Northampton, MA. A former staff member and resident at Pendle Hill (a Quaker retreat center in Pennsylvania), Emily also brings many years of experience as a grassroots organizer at the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) and in several U.S. congressional campaigns. You can read more about Emily on our Staff Bios page, and look forward to seeing much more from her here in the coming months!

The Friends House was both lucky and challenged to receive many strong applications for this position. We’re sincerely grateful to everyone who took the time and effort to apply as well as to the members of our search committee for their care and discernment throughout the whole process.

The Program Manager role is a new full-time position focused on stewarding and expanding our public programming: not only the speaker series, film screenings, workshops, public witness, and other events that we’ve been working hard on already, but also the use of our space by community organizations, nonprofits, and other outside groups working for a better world. All of us at the Friends House are excited about how this new staff role, and Emily in it, will help make the House that much more vibrant for residents and visitors alike. This is a big step in fulfilling the 2017 Beacon Hill Friends House Strategic Plan to grow our role as a center for learning, leadership, and action grounded in Quaker principles of faith, simplicity, integrity, community, and social responsibility – while continuing our 61-year tradition as an intentional residential community grounded in those same values.

While we intend the position to eventually be self-sustaining through grants, contributions, and cost-sharing from outside groups using our meeting spaces, bringing on the Program Manager now has only been possible because of the generous donations so far to our ongoing Strategic Plan fundraising campaign from so many of you who believe in the vision of the Friends House. Thank you, thank you, thank you!