NEYM Legacy Gift Funds Grant Program

Concord (NH) Monthly Meeting

Grant Progress Report for Legacy Gift Funds Grant Program [1]

January 21, 2025

In December, 2023, Concord Monthly Meeting of New England Yearly Meeting was awarded $3,000 from New England Yearly Meeting’s Legacy Gift Funds Grant Program to help defray the $67,000 cost of installing a geothermal heat pump system and making needed Fire Safety improvements in our Meetinghouse. 

By mid-September 2023, the new heating system had been installed, and the needed Fire Safety improvements had been completed.  The geothermal heating system has been working well since then, and we have been approved by the State Fire Marshall for additional building uses besides those we have been using it for since the Meetinghouse was built. 

We have raised more than $30,000 from members and grant sources (see our total project financial analysis after this page) and, by early in 2025 when we expect a Federal rebate to have been received, we expect the Meeting will have expended less than the $20,000 of our replacement reserve cash that we had originally budgeted for this project.

The key accomplishment of this project is that our Meetinghouse is now 100% net carbon neutral.  We have gotten rid of the wood-pellet furnace and large pellet bin that previously heated the water in our radiant floor.  We are now relying solely on electricity to bring the water for heating up 400 ft. from under the ground, raise that water’s temperature up to an adequate level for our building, and circulate the hot water through the water coils already in our slab floor throughout the building before returning it to the same depth underground.

All of the electricity that we need each year for our Meetinghouse is being provided by the solar electric panels that we have had on the Meetinghouse’s roof for over six years.  The solar panels [2] generate more than enough electricity for our needs and the excess supply is provided to three cooperating homeowners under a long term “Power Purchase Agreement”.  Over any particular year, any excess electricity that the panels generate is sold back to the local power company for a purchase credit.

Now that we are not burning wood pellets, nor using any carbon-based energy, we are able to claim that our Meetinghouse, over any 12-month period, is 100% net carbon neutral. 

Moreover, we believe that our Meetinghouse is one of the few, if not the only, Quaker Meetings in New England to be 100% net carbon neutral, and perhaps the only house of worship in the greater Concord, NH, area that can make this claim.

Furthermore, we have been able to use our Meetinghouse for two additional purposes as a result of our project fund raising effort to improve our Fire Safety enhancements:

1. We have begun offering our building for events that need more room than the 49-person limit we had originally been constrained to by the Fire Marshal when we built the Meetinghouse in 1990.  Our first large event, in 2024, was a fund-raising music event that attracted over 70 people, mostly non-members or attenders at our Meeting.
2. We are now in the second year of leasing part of our Meetinghouse to an outdoor pre-school program during school days for about twelve children.  They use our Fellowship Room for lunch and daily naps, our kitchen preparation area for making their lunches, and our bathrooms during the nine hours each weekday they are there.

Not only have many families become aware of our Meeting as a result of this new program but we are also offering affordable daycare to our surrounding area, a service that is greatly needed by families of below average household income.