Adult Member Self-Reliance Report

There is a new report on "Leader & Clerk Resources" called Adult Member Self-Reliance. It states:

Those Who Need Help to Provide for the Necessities of Life

Please mark below the self-reliance status of all adult members in your unit. Self-reliance is “the ability, commitment, and effort to provide for the temporal and spiritual necessities of life for self and family” (Handbook 2: Administering the Church [2010], 6.1.1). Update this status quarterly or as often as needed. Bishops are the only leaders who may indicate the self-reliance status of adult members. However, clerks may enter this information as provided by the bishop.

Based on these instructions it appears that you would not only mark "NO" for those receiving welfare assistance, but also "NO" for all those that are "INACTIVE" as well (ability to provide temporal and SPIRITUAL necessities of life). Would that be a correct assumption?

The greater challenge is for the Bishop to indicate those who cannot provide for the spiritual necessities that are active members. I am not sure how that will be defined at a local level, I would assume the Bishops in a stake will counsel together at a Bishops welfare council and set some broad guidelines. That is assuming that guidance isn't supplied from the brethren.

Perhaps the report function has rolled out ahead of instruction. I'd wait until instructions have been received. I'm sure it was created for a purpose and I wouldn't want to guess on the details.

If I had to guess, I'd say it someone who can't live without some kind of assistance - be it welfare support or someone to do errands for them.

I been wondering too the purpose of this list. Whether it is just bishop's check list or if the stake or area is going to gather statistics based on it. I assume they will inform us about it some time soon. Until that, I don't think we will use it.

nikk3hi3tala wrote:Whether it is just bishop's check list or if the stake or area is going to gather statistics based on it.

There is a stake-level summary of this report with a pie chart for each ward. Screenshot below since nothing has been entered in by wards yet so there's nothing confidential. I haven't seen the ward-level report yet.

A new notice was posted about the tool at Letters.LDS.org, dated September 20, 2015:
https://letters.lds.org/document/pdf?it ... nline=true

In its entirety, it says:

An optional new Adult Member Self-Reliance tool is now available to help bishops, branch presidents, and stake and district presidents to consider the self-reliance needs of their members.

This optional tool is available in the “Reports” section of the Leader and Clerk Resources website or at leader.lds.org/self-reliance.

It says that Bishops are the only ones who can designate the status, but clerks can enter it. I'm an assistant clerk and my access is read only, so I guess it's limited to the actual ward clerk. I was kind of hoping to have edit ability so I could see what the choices are.

For each adult, the choices are: Self-reliant? (Yes/No)

That is it.