It’s a pickle — can you help us out?
Foundation Beyond Belief, the non-profit humanist charitable organization I am proud to run, has had a frankly amazing year.
Our members contributed over $24,000 for tsunami and famine relief, helped build a library in Ghana and a humanist school in Uganda, and helped alleviate hunger and improve access to health care in India, Ecuador, Tanzania, and the U.S. We’ve pioneered a unique experiment in cooperation between worldviews and launched a humanist volunteer corps in 12 U.S. cities. We expect to exceed 1000 members by the end of December and a quarter million dollars in total donations by March.
But we’re running into a bit of a pickle. Unlike most non-profits, we spend each year encouraging our supporters to give to other charities. Then, in the final weeks of the year, we ask them to give more, to the Foundation itself…and sometimes, the well is understandably dry.
See the pickle?
To make matters worse, two of our major funders have now closed their grant programs. (Yikes.) We have ideas for replacing that income in the long run, but in the short run, we could really use your help.
We don’t eat much. In fact, we’ve been so careful about admin costs that we spent less on operations in 2011 than we did in 2010. That’s pretty good, considering we also added Volunteers Beyond Belief and Humanist Crisis Response this year.
Because our members have given and given all year long, we’re bringing this drive outside of the circle to people who support what we’re doing but are not necessarily part of the Foundation. If you can see your way clear to send a few bob our way, we’d be grateful for it.
Whether or not you can do that, we’ve made it especially easy this year to share the drive through your social media by sharing a link or creating a widget or a fundraising page of your own. It’s all very easy and quick.
So if you can help us end the year strong, please…click the pickle!
OMG…My secret is out.
It’s been 11 years since I first stepped out of the closet by posting quotes from famous nonbelievers on my office door at the Catholic college in Minnesota where I taught.
I took another step out when I published a satirical novel about a secular humanist professor at a Catholic college in Minnesota, did a book signing at the college bookstore, and ended up profiled in the local paper under the heading “Profile of Unbelief.”
I blew my cover even more with the nonreligious parenting book I co-authored and edited in 2007, not to mention the Newsweek article about it that same year. Being named Harvard Humanist of the Year in 2008 probably didn’t help my camouflage, nor did the release of my second nonreligious parenting book the year after that.
Traveling all over the country teaching nonreligious parenting workshops and writing about it on my Facebook page every time is a bad way to keep the whole thing hushed up, as was launching a secular humanist charitable foundation in 2010.
The bumper sticker on my car, my email address, and the 515 blog posts about secular parenting are also, now that I think about it, dead giveaways.
Ah, well. Despite these minor slip-ups, my secret was still safe in some distant corners of the world.
Like my own family.
“Did you hear that Dale is AN ATHEIST??” wrote one cousin of mine to another a few weeks ago, I just found out. “I cried all day. What should we do??”
Damn, I thought. Who squealed?
I picture Richard Dawkins being collared at a family reunion. “Bless me, if it isn’t Cousin Dickie! What have you been up to, old bean? Godly work, one hopes, wot?”
20 Reasons to support FBB in July
Humanists like to have good reasons for what they do. It’s one of the most adorable things about us. That’s why Foundation Beyond Belief, a humanist charitable membership organization, is building its member/donor drive around 20 Reasons to Give or Join in July.
Maybe you’ll join or give because without a God, it’s up to us to make things better on this planet, or because we don’t keep a dime of your donations to the featured charities, or because our regular giving model appeals to you.
Maybe you’ll do it for the yummy dopamine hit or the pretty decent chance to win an iPad2.
There’s also the opportunity to confuse Arthur Brooks, who says the secular suffer from a “virtue gap,” or to make Dinesh D’Souza look even sillier.
Then there’s our new Volunteers Beyond Belief program to support, Andrew Jackson’s hair to celebrate, and fear, arguably the greatest cause of human misery, to overcome.
Start at our 20 Reasons page, select your own favorite reason, and share it on Facebook and beyond.
For the videogenic among us, there’s the 20 Reasons Video Contest. Make a short video (<60 seconds) about your reason for being a member or supporter of Foundation Beyond Belief -- funny, serious, animated, whatever — then upload it to YouTube as a response to this one by FBB board member Zach Moore. Share it, ask your friends to Like it, and we’ll do the same by posting it on all of our social media pages. The two videos with the most Likes at the end of July will each receive a $50 Amazon gift certificate.
It comes down to this: We’re really proud of what we’ve done so far, putting compassionate humanism to work by raising over $160,000 for outstanding charities worldwide, and we’re excited about what’s next. Our Volunteers Beyond Belief program launched today, with chapters in eight U.S. cities, and our ongoing humanist emergency response program will launch on August 1. We’re working hard to build a positive, effective expression of compassionate humanism. We need your help to keep it moving forward by donating, joining, or just spreading the word.
Thanks for doing whatever you can to make our July drive a success.
Look at the puppy
Asking for money is not a strength of mine. My allowance stayed put for about seven years when I was a kid because I never thought to ask for more. So it’s no surprise that my least favorite part of heading up a non-profit is asking those who support its mission to help keep us going financially.
Yet here I am…and there you are.
Hi.
The expenses incurred in running Foundation Beyond Belief are not huge, but they are a decidedly positive number. One hundred percent of our member contributions goes straight to our featured beneficiaries. But before the checks can go out, we have to assess and select the charities and present them to the membership. We’ve created a unique website to showcase their work, to allow our members to distribute their donations as they wish, and to provide a distinctive voice for humanists in the philanthropic community.
That’s what you see in front of the curtain.
Behind it, there’s a tremendous amount of sawing and drilling going on. In addition to assessing nearly 100 new nominated charities each quarter, we have communications with members and beneficiaries, professional web design and maintenance for a complex site, bookkeeping, grant writing, publicity, tax preparation, web hosting, and ever so much more. To pay for all that, we rely on the generosity of our friends — those who believe that what we’re doing has real value.
We’re 60 percent of the way through our year-end fund drive but only 22 percent to the amount needed to finish the year in the black. Our sincere thanks go out to those of you who’ve brought us this far.
Now we need all the rest of y’all. No, really. Don’t make the puppy sad.
IF you think the Foundation is a worthwhile project AND you can help us out, please consider clicking on the big orange button in the pretty blue widget in the sidebar of this humble blog. Thanks!
(Puppy.)
Help Foundation Beyond Belief finish 2010 strong
It’s been a great year. With six weeks to go in 2010, the humanist members of Foundation Beyond Belief have raised over $70,000 for 37 outstanding charities.
Now we’re asking for a little help ourselves.
In 2010 our members fed, clothed, and paid school tuition for 22 impoverished children in Nepal. We have funded science education in India and in US public schools and supported efforts to fight global warming and protect biodiversity.
We put textbooks in Uganda’s humanist schools and peacebuilding teams in Uganda’s conflict areas. We funded efforts to improve access to health care for marginalized populations on four continents and in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake. We helped launch a new Camp Quest in Virginia and helped build a new school for girls in Pakistan.
We’ve added humanist voices and dollars to the fight for LGBT rights, the key civil rights struggle of our time. We’ve empowered adoptions, fed the hungry, and worked to protect the most vulnerable—refugees in war, victims of torture, women under threat of religious violence, political asylees, people struggling with addiction, and those hoping for dignity at the end of their lives.
Creating a new humanist community effort has been so gratifying. But it also comes with expenses, such as grant writing, publicity, web hosting, member communications, and professional accounting. Since we are committed to remaining a 100 percent pass-through organization, we rely on separate donations for our operational costs. Because the current economy took a serious bite out of our major funding sources, we are left with an operating deficit for 2010.
Can you help us close that gap?
We have big plans for 2011, including tripling membership and donations, creating a disaster relief fund, and launching both a kids’ giving program and a cutting-edge initiative reaching out to other worldviews. It’s going to be an amazing year of active, compassionate humanism.
Please help us end our first year strong and secure by clicking on the big blue ChipIn box in the sidebar OR by going to our ChipIn page to make a tax-deductible donation of any amount to the Foundation itself.
Deepest thanks for your support and encouragement!
Dale McGowan, Executive Director
Foundation Beyond Belief
New blog to support secular parenting groups
While writing and researching Parenting Beyond Belief in 2006, I went searching for secular parenting groups in the U.S. and found precisely one.
I certainly might have missed some, but the fact that a diligent search didn’t turn up more than one is a pretty clear indication of how few and far between they were.
Zip forward four years, and though we’re still a tad short of Starbucks-level saturation, the landscape has changed pretty dramatically. I’m currently aware of more than forty groups in North America ranging in age from three weeks to three years and in size from half a dozen to nearly 150 members.
As I’ve tracked the activities and growth of these groups, I’ve come to realize how isolated most of them are from each other. Most start from scratch, finding members and planning activities by trial and error. Wheels are reinvented — and they’re occasionally square. While some groups thrive, others disappear within a few months.
One of the original purposes of Foundation Beyond Belief was to provide a central source of information and support for these groups. We did some good work along those lines early in the year, conducting a large-scale secular parent survey and helping to birth about a half dozen new groups. But we kept running into a problem.
Me.
The IRS had expressed reasonable concern that a firewall be maintained between the non-profit Foundation and the for-a-wee-smidge-of-profit world of Parenting Beyond Belief. To demonstrate their seriousness, they brought the tax exemption process for FBB to a screaming halt when a staff blog entry on the Foundation website linked to a site that in turn included a sidebar link to buy my book.
That delayed our approval by six weeks.
So we were understandably skittish about ever so much as mentioning Parenting Beyond Belief, Raising Freethinkers, the PBB Channel on YouTube, the PBB Forum, this blog, etc. in Foundation communications. In other words, we could support secular parents as long as we avoided mentioning 75 percent of the resources for secular parents.
It eventually became crystal clear that this just wasn’t going to work. I am now in the process of building deeper support resources for secular parenting groups on this very website. And the first effort in that direction is a new blog called Parents Beyond Belief.
The blog is a space for secular parenting groups to help each other create effective communities for nontheistic parents by exchanging ideas and stories. If all goes well, you’ll hear precious little from me and tons from people who know what they’re talking about — the actual leaders and members of secular parenting groups. The first post is already up, and six others are on the way.
Don’t wait for an invitation! If you are currently in a secular parenting group and would like to submit a post about anything related to your group — finding members, naming the group, childcare issues, what to do at meetings, field trips, book clubs, play groups, food, dues, online presence, community service, resolving disagreements, you name it — just write up a brief description of your intended piece and send it to me for consideration. If it looks like a good fit, I’ll invite you to write the piece.
Guidelines for posts: Submissions must be relevant to the blog’s purpose, under 700 words, well-written and engaging.
A small group of reviewers will help me select entries in the early going. Contributors who have a few pieces accepted will be considered for a position as blog administrator. And once we have a few of those, I intend to step quietly aside and let y’all run with it.
Embiggening humanism
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man. — Jebediah Springfield
I’m alternately enjoying and “D’oh!”-ing my way through a controversy of my own creation at Foundation Beyond Belief. The following are my personal thoughts on the matter, btw, not an official statement of the Foundation (which is why they are found here, on my blog, not there, on its).
After repeatedly noting that this secular humanist foundation would consider supporting charities based in any worldview so long as they do not proselytize, we’ve put our commitment to the test. This quarter, FBB is featuring a religiously-based charity as one of our ten options for member support.
The category is Peace, the religion is Quakerism, and the organization is Quaker Peace and Social Witness. And the reaction is pretty much what I expected — a mix of bravos, surprise, outrage, enthusiasm, and revealed (shall we say, and gently) knowledge gaps in some of my beloved fellow nontheists. More on the “gaps” later.
Some blogs ask why on Earth we would do such a thing. “I’m an atheist. I don’t support religious groups,” said one, as if the second sentence follows obviously and necessarily from the first.
So the first reason to do it is to show that it is indeed possible for nontheists to see good work being done in a religious context and to support and encourage it. Far from a contradiction, some of us think that’s humanism at its best.
The second reason is that many of our members want to express their humanism in that way. And since the Foundation exists to allow individual humanists a means of expressing their worldview positively and doing good in the name of that worldview, it seems fitting to occasionally feature a carefully-screened, non-dogmatic, non-proselytizing, effective organization based in a sane and progressive denomination as one of our choices.
“Well,” one commenter said, “if you HAVE TO support a religious group, I mean absolutely HAVE to, I suppose the Quakers would be the ones.”
A glimmer of light there. But we didn’t have to do this. My word, it would have been much easier not to. We wanted to do it. We see value in doing it.
In a way, this should be a non-issue. Individual members have full control over the distribution of their donations and can zero out any category any time. Some members, disinterested in supporting a religiously-based organization no matter how progressive, have made perfect and appropriate use of this flexible system by shifting their funds elsewhere this quarter. Others — including such strong atheist voices as Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism — have actually increased their Peace donation in support of this idea. That’s freethought in action.
Not all religious expressions are benign, of course. The more a religious tradition insists on conformity to a received set of ideas, the more harm it does. The more it allows people to challenge ideas and think independently, the more good it does. Religion will always be with us in some form. It’s too hand-in-glove with human aspirations and failings to ever vanish at the touch of argument or example. So I think one of the best ways for humanists to confront the malignant is to support and encourage the benign, the non-dogmatic, the progressive.
Speaking of whom.
Liberal Quakers are utterly non-dogmatic, include many nontheists in their ranks, and hold that no individual can tell any other what to believe. That’s a religious organization embracing the essence of freethought. It’s no coincidence that they also have a brilliant history of social justice work. While Southern Baptists fronted biblical arguments in support of slavery, Quakers were among the most courageous abolitionists (along with Northern Baptists). While the Catholic Church vigorously opposed women’s voting rights, Quakers were often leading the movement and getting themselves arrested and imprisoned in the process (along with many Catholic individuals who recognized bad dogma when they saw it). And while multiple denominations rend themselves in twain over gay rights, Liberal Quakers were among the first to openly support gay rights and gay marriage. (This last is not so much the case with Orthodox Quakers, who differ from the Liberals in several respects.)
In the area of peace and nonviolence advocacy, Quakers are second to none. Continuing a centuries-old tradition, Quaker Peace & Social Witness is at work in the Ugandan conflict, supporting and training groups working on peacemaking and peacebuilding; facilitating truth and reconciliation work to deal with the past in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia; managing teams of human rights observers in Palestine and Israel; working to strengthen nonviolent movements in South Asia; and advocating at the UN for refugees and for disarmament policies. In 1947, QPSW shared the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Maybe you can see why we’re proud to support them.
Making discernments is difficult, but it’s worth doing. That’s why the (don’t say ignorance, don’t say ignorance) misinformedness of some atheists about the spectrum of religion has troubled me.
“I am NOT giving money to somebody who’s going to hit me over the head with a bible or say my kids are going to hell,” said one. Fair enough. Of course there’s as much chance of a bluefooted booby doing either of those as a Liberal Quaker.
Others who probably recognize a slippery slope fallacy if someone else uses it (“You can’t let gays marry. Next thing you know, farmers will be marrying their tractors!”) went ahead and employed one themselves. “It’s a slippery slope,” said one email. “A year from now, you’ll be paying for Catholic missionaries!” (I especially enjoy it when someone calls a fallacy by name, then pulls the ripcord anyhow.)
And on it goes. This is what siloing will do to good and smart people. It makes them sloppy, myself included. And we talk nonsense, and end up looking silly to anyone outside of our silo.
One atheist friend predicted we would lose a third of our members overnight. In the two weeks since we announced the decision, two members have closed their accounts (neither mentioning the Quaker choice) and 24 have joined.
The weakness of the arguments against our choice has reassured me, and the majority of responses I’ve heard have been strongly supportive of the idea of providing members with this option. “I’m so proud to be a part of this,” said one member. “Honestly, it’s like the free thought movement is growing up all at once. Thank you for showing vision beyond the usual sounding of alarms and building of barricades.”
Can’t you just feel the embiggening?
The Foundation Summer Drive!
It’s been 18 weeks since Foundation Beyond Belief was born in a flurry of humanistic generosity. Through monthly donations in the amount of their choice, our 400+ members have contributed nearly $25,000 for such outstanding organizations as Refugees International, the Point Foundation, the National Center for Science Education, ActionAid International, SMART Recovery, and the Haitian Health Foundation.
If you’d like to learn more, or to join this great experiment in humanist philanthropy, click on the handsome new JOIN US! badge in the sidebar or to the right.
If you’d like to help promote the Foundation, grab one of 22 badges and banners for your own blog or website from our new Help Us Grow page.
Finally, if you can spare a few bucks to help keep the Foundation itself up and running, we’d be grateful for your support in the Summer Drive. Click here or on the big blue widget in the sidebar to give us a hand.
Thanks for your help!
Secular parent survey results!
To help set the course for our parent community program, Foundation Beyond Belief conducted a survey of nontheistic parents in February of this year—the first of its kind, as far as we can tell. The survey was unscientific (e.g. subjects were self-selected and the survey was advertised on websites that skew in the direction of organized secularism), as is the following analysis. But the project has given us a fascinating and sometimes surprising window into the world of secular parenting.
A total of 1740 people completed the survey, including secular parents in 49 U.S. states (87% of total respondents), 10 Canadian provinces (6%), and 19 other countries (7%).
Respondents were primarily women (60/40)—interesting because organized freethought skews heavily male. Most respondents are raising 1-2 children (38 and 39%, respectively), most are in a two-parent home (89%), and the largest percentage (39.4%) are in a big city suburb.
The largest percentage of respondents (27.4%) report that they themselves were raised in a mainline Protestant denomination, followed closely by Catholic (24.3%) and a poetic tie between atheist and evangelical (11.6% each). These numbers are somewhat muddied by the fact that of the 23% of respondents who checked “Other,” about half listed a denomination that fit one of the listed categories. That’s what an unscientific survey design will get you.
Of those in mixed worldview marriages, 47.8% report very little tension between the parents over issues of parenting and religion, and 41.1% report some tension and occasional issues. Just 6.7% reported frequent issues and 4.4% experience significant, severe conflict over parenting and religion.
I was surprised and pleased to see that only 11 percent of mixed secular/religious marriages in the survey seem to be grappling with these issues on a frequent or severe basis. It’s no less troubling for those people, of course, but as the Foundation develops its parent support program, we can be more effective and efficient in offering solutions if we know the extent of the problem.
The next question also produced something of a surprise to me:
Just over a quarter of respondents (25.5%) report an extended family that is moderate to intense in its religiosity. My surprise is partly an artifact of reportage—the vast majority of my own correspondence and contact with secular parents comes from those in a deeply religious extended family.
Over a third of respondents (35.2%) are in an extended family that ranges from secular to mildly religious, while the largest proportion (39.2%) are in a situation of significant variety, either split along two or more sides of the extended family or scrambled up within the whole.
I think this can be an ideal situation for raising kids who genuinely think for themselves. If your extended family is too uniform (either strictly religious or strictly secular), a parent has to expend more effort to be sure other points of view are represented. When my wife Becca, a fairly conventional Christian believer for most of our marriage, came to self-identify as a secular humanist, it eliminated what small tensions we had over those questions but also deprived us of what had been a handy safety valve against unintended indoctrination. Fortunately we still have a variety of views in the extended family to provide that diversity.
Fewer than half of respondents report significant religious pressure or indoctrination directed at their kids. Family members, unsurprisingly, are the source of most pressure from those who do report it:
(Totals exceed 100% because respondents were free to choose more than one source of pressure.)
And what’s the pressure about? You can probably guess:
How do secular parents expose their kids to religion?
Another question asked about the parent’s feelings about his or her child’s eventual worldview. I’ve often said that it seemed to me that most secular parents are genuinely committed to raising their kids to make their own choices, and the survey seemed to bear this out. Even most of those who hope their kids choose atheism affirm a desire that the choice be their children’s own:
(Complete purple question, which was very carefully worded: “The choice is theirs, and though some religious identities would make me heartsick, others would be fine”)
Finally, two related questions that are of central importance as we build the Foundation’s secular parent support program:
The greatest need of nontheistic parents by far seems to be simply finding and connecting with other nontheistic parents. This result was profoundly influential for the Foundation. It became clear that our original plan to train seminar leaders would not meet the most common need. What is needed is ongoing support for local groups that can help remove the crushing sense of isolation that so many secular parents feel. What’s needed is not a lecture but an opportunity to socialize, to mingle, to informally share experiences and ideas—to simply be with other parents who are raising their kids with the same challenges and opportunities.
Best of all, nearly 1,000 respondents expressed an interest in being contacted if a secular parenting group formed in their area, and nearly a third of these were willing to help start such groups. Ute Mitchell, our parent community coordinator, is currently using the contact data from the survey to help form groups in the ten U.S. states with the most survey respondents (some obviously the result of higher population):
…after which we’ll continue with other states and provinces SOON. We’re also continuing to build the parent resource section of the Foundation website, which will launch in the coming weeks.
Thanks again to all participants! More surveys to come.
Foundation Beyond Belief in NYT
Atheists’ Collection Plate, With Religious Inspiration
BY SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
ALPHARETTA, Ga. –– Four or five Sundays in 2005, his own atheism notwithstanding, Dale McGowan took his family into the neo-Gothic grandeur of St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis on a kind of skeptic’s field trip.
Mr. McGowan went because he wanted his three young children to have “religious literacy.” He went because his mother-in-law, Barbara Maples, belonged to the congregation. He went because, as a college professor with a fondness for weekend sweatpants, church gave him the rare chance to wear the ties she invariably gave him for his birthday.
Something else began to strike Mr. McGowan on those visits. He listened to the vicar preach about ministering to the poor, and he learned that the cathedral helped to sponsor a weekly dinner for the homeless. Most importantly, he watched as the collection plate moved through the pews and as his mother-in-law, who volunteered at those dinners, dropped in her offering.
All those details added up to a nonbeliever’s revelation. The theology and the voluntarism and the philanthropy, Mr. McGowan came to realize, were part of a greater whole, a commitment to charity as part of religious practice. And on that practice, this atheist felt lacking. To put it in church slang, he was convicted.
Rather than adopt faith, however, Mr. McGowan set out to emulate it, or at least its culture of giving. He set out to, in effect, create the atheist’s collection plate. By now, five years later, that impulse has taken the form of a nonprofit foundation that solicits donations from atheists and bundles them into contributions to organizations in fields like public health, environmentalism, gay rights and refugee aid.
Within the next week or so, Mr. McGowan expects to cut checks for a total of $12,025, the first benefits collected and disbursed by the Foundation Beyond Belief.