So…are you in?
Foundation Beyond Belief is halfway through its first fund drive—but only 37 percent of the way to the goal.
Over 1600 people expressed their support for this project by signing up for our mailing list and Facebook group—a fantastic show of enthusiasm. But just four percent of those have so far been moved to donate to this crucial fund drive. We are enormously grateful to those few—but we need the rest of you.
Here’s why.
By the end of next year, we hope to empower a new force in philanthropic giving, fuel the great work of over thirty charitable organizations around the world, and begin to transform the popular perception of secular humanism. On the educational side, we will create both a community and a resource center for nonreligious parents.
To accomplish all of this, we need a world-class web center—not just a “brochure” site with a donation button, but a touchpoint and resource center for a vibrant and engaged community of humanists.
The site will include detailed information about featured organizations, a forum and social network for members to debate, investigate, and help select future beneficiaries, an invitational blog on humanism and philanthropy, and profiles to allow members to distribute their monthly donations among the causes as they see fit.
So—IF you support this idea, and IF you can spare the shekels, please take a moment to help create this Foundation by making a donation of any size in the sidebar.
We’ll do our best to make you proud.
Dale McGowan
Executive Director
Foundation Beyond Belief
The FBB Founding Fund Drive
Two big news items for Foundation Beyond Belief, the new humanist charitable and educational foundation scheduled to launch on January 1:
Web designer selected
Our call for web designers brought applications from 19 high-quality professionals. After a process both excruciating and exciting, the Foundation Board has selected From Concept to Completion to create the initial “pre-launch” site by October 1 AND our fully functional online community for humanist philanthropy by January 1. Our sincere thanks to all those who applied.
Founding Fund Drive
The Foundation is ready at last to accept tax-deductible donations! Our Founding Fund Drive, which begins today and runs through Sept. 1, will help create a world-class web presence for the Foundation community and spread the word about the Foundation through a professional publicity campaign.
We’re working hard to make this initiative a powerful expression of humanism at its very best. Many thanks for your support and encouragement, as well as your patience as we find our way forward.
(To contribute, please click on the big blue ChipIn widget at the top of the sidebar.)
“Values and beliefs with which we don’t agree”
I’m spending a lot of time and effort vetting firms to create the website for Foundation Beyond Belief. All in all an aggravating and slow process. Yesterday I filled out a long and detailed form about the Foundation and the site we need for a web design firm in my old home state of Minnesota.
Today I received this reply:
Hi Dale,
I appreciate the time you took to fill out our website questionnaire. Unfortunately, I don’t think we are a good fit for developing your website as we are committed Christians. I think it would be difficult for us to give our all to a website promoting values and beliefs with which we don’t agree.
Thanks again for your time. I hope you understand my reasons for declining your request.
M___
I usually let this kind of thing roll off my back, but this one got under my skin in a way that nothing has for years. For one thing, I doubt they’d have offered the same reason to a Jewish or Muslim foundation. (On second thought, who knows.) I was also struck by the fact that our values are suspect even when we’re involved in an overtly charitable initiative.
I replied:
Hi M___,
Thanks so much for your reply. I must agree, we would be a very poor fit — but not because you are committed Christians.
Our foundation is dedicated primarily to the encouragement of charitable giving among the nonreligious but will be supporting both religious and secular charities. I would only want to work with someone who shares those values of generosity and openness, who sees the importance of reaching across lines of difference. Thanks for letting me know that you don’t agree with such values.
My current website was created by two committed Christians, one of whom is a past administrator for the Campus Crusade for Christ. They noted our differences but recognized that we share the same core values of mutual respect and a desire to make the world a better place.
Here’s to more Christians like them.
Dale
(If you are a professional web designer who would like to be considered for this job — regardless of your worldview — drop me a note with a link to your online portfolio. My contact info is in the sidebar.)
Fighting the fallacies of friends
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I have a guilty pleasure: It’s watching my chest-thumping rationalist friends commit the human errors they can’t forgive in others. I do the same thing myself at times (see image at left). Hoo-hoo-hoo-HAAA!
Since Foundation Beyond Belief went public last week, I’ve received a lot of encouragement and a lot of priceless constructive advice. But there’ve also been a few angry sneers — few, but loud — always from the nonreligious so far, always written in the Snark dialect, and at the moment favoring a single whopping logical error.
In the announcement, I said that religious people in the U.S. give away a greater percentage of their income than those self-identified as nonreligious. I said it because it is both true and well-documented by reliable research.1 I quickly followed by noting that this is NOT a question of character, but a natural result of one group passing a plate 52 times a year and the other not.
Still I knew, even as I wrote it, what snarky fate awaited me.
A few folks told me, with great irritation, that my claim is nonsense because most of the money donated by the religious goes to run religious institutions. Their facts are correct — churches absorb 74-78% of the offerings and donations of their members — but it’s irrelevant to the claim that religious individuals give more.
They go on to say that if the money kept by the churches were removed from the equation, the disparity vanishes. This, I’m afraid, is both irrelevant and false. The very same surveys show churchgoers beating non-churchgoers in levels of giving to secular charities.
But whether true or false, this argument’s irrelevance is what kills me. The original claim is about the personal act of giving, not how the money is used by those who receive it. So my chest-thumping friends have responded to one claim by refuting something entirely else — just the sort of thing they can’t abide in the religious.
In a related fallacy, several point out that this or that source is a conservative, or a Catholic, or an evangelical, and therefore not worth listening to. Since I don’t trust ANY secondary source out of hand, I looked at the primary sources. And in this case, Brooks and Barna, et al. were right.
It happens, you know.
I do think we have an opportunity to be better stewards of individual generosity than churches. We have no buildings, choir robes, or parking lots to pay for, no youth retreats, no missionaries. But while we’re acknowledging that church-based donations don’t go very far out the door, let’s restate and underline the original point: Religious folks give away a (much) greater percentage of their personal income than the nonreligious. We do several things better than they do. This is one of several things they do best. It’s not a question of character, but of the need for a systematic means of giving as an expression of worldview outside of those church doors.
Either way, it’s a problem worth tackling. Church attendance is declining rapidly in the U.S., and if churchgoers give a lot more to charity, this constitutes a genuine concern for philanthropy.
It’s time to acknowledge the facts, set our diversionary tactics aside, and learn from anyone who has something to teach us. That, among other things, is what Foundation Beyond Belief is about.
Join the Foundation Beyond Belief group on Facebook Causes, or click here to join our mailing list.
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1Surveys by Independent Sector, the Giving Institute, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, 2002 General Social Survey, American Community Survey of the U.S. Census, and more.
What a day
Some days it just plain pays to get out of bed.
For the past 110 days, Nonviolent Peaceforce, the global civilian peacekeeping organization for which I work, has been traumatized by the kidnapping of one of our peacekeepers on Basilan Island in the Philippines, a Sri Lankan national named Umar Jaleel. Since his abduction on February 13, I have had the privilege of watching from the inside as this frankly amazing organization worked tirelessly to bring about his release without violence or ransom. I can finally talk about it publicly because today, at 1245 UTC, Jaleel was released and is now receiving medical attention before returning home to his family. We are all beyond relieved.
Jaleel is one of a team of 17 International Civilian Peacekeepers (ICPs) serving in the Mindanao region of the Philippines, where fighting between the Armed Forces of the Philippines and an Islamic separatist group has put tens of thousands of civilians in the line of fire. The ICPs offer accompaniment and protective presence to displaced persons while working with local peacebuilding groups to create lasting structures for nonviolent conflict resolution. The idea is to protect civilians during this conflict while building civil society structures to prevent the next one. A new model for managing and resolving conflict — and it works.
This afternoon I talked for over an hour with Jeff MacDonald, a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor. He’s working on a piece about how the nonreligious movement in the U.S. is not only growing but changing in character — becoming more humanistic, as it were, more comfortable with and interested in the emotional side of things — less exclusively focused on the intellectual. More Sally than Harry, you might say.
Then there’s the growth of Foundation Beyond Belief. Since the announcement on June 1st, over 550 600 650 people have signed up on either the Facebook Causes page or the mailing list. I was hoping for 1,000 Foundation members by January 1. While mailing list does not equal donating members, I do think it’s time to upgrade my dreams a bit.
In addition to the general interest, I’ve been blizzarded with messages from people wanting to help in one way or another, and even a few from organizations hoping to be considered as beneficiaries.
I daresay we’ve struck a chord.
I’ll keep you all updated as we hit major landmarks. Much fun and sweat ahead!
Join Foundation Beyond Belief on Facebook
(Not on Facebook? Join the mailing list here.)
Introducing…Foundation Beyond Belief
Being a humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead. — Kurt Vonnegut
I don’t give as much as I’d like to the causes I care about. I consider myself a pretty generous guy, and when I give, I give generously. But I get to the end of each year and realize that I just haven’t given as much as I wish I had. Again.
Another thing: When religious folks give through religious charities and churches, it registers as an expression of their worldview. I want that too. I want my contributions to “count” as a visible expression of my secular humanism.
Then there’s this: Multiple solid surveys by philanthropic research organizations like Independent Sector and the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey1 show that churchgoers give a much greater percentage of their income to charitable causes than non-churchgoers like me. Arthur C. Brooks (author of Who Really Cares) is pretty sure he’s got my number: he says it’s “evidence of a gap in everyday virtue” (p. 40) between the religious and nonreligious.
I think he’s missing something obvious. If people in Group A are asked to pass a plate full of the generous donations of their friends and neighbors and either add to it or not, 52 times a year, while people in Group B have no such regular and public nudge — I’d say something other than virtue is in play.
I think the difference has much more to do with whether or not you have systematic opportunities for giving than some “gap in virtue.” I speak at Unitarian fellowships and Ethical Societies all the time, places brimming with friendly atheists. And when that offering plate passes by, I give, and so do they, knowing that these places will use it to do some good.
The offering plate is also passing through a million mainstream church pews every Sunday, giving the religious an easy and regular way to give and to combine their giving with others as a positive collective expression of their worldview.
I don’t agree with those who insist religious people give primarily out of fear or guilt. That may be in the mix, but most I know give because they are challenged and encouraged to do so, because generosity feels wonderful, and because the habit of giving turns giving into a habit.
I want to do better. It’s time for those of us who are otherwise engaged on Sunday mornings to have our own easy and regular means of giving, one that focuses and encourages humanistic generosity and demonstrates it to the world.
Welcome to Foundation Beyond Belief.
> what it is
Foundation Beyond Belief is a new charitable and educational foundation created (1) to focus, encourage and demonstrate humanistic generosity, and (2) to support a nationwide nonreligious parent education program.
The Foundation will highlight ten charitable organizations per quarter–one in each of ten areas (health, poverty, environment, education, human rights, and more). Members join the Foundation by signing up for a monthly automatic donation in the amount of their choice, then set up personal profiles to indicate how they would like their contribution distributed among the ten categories. Maybe you’d like to give 25 percent each to human rights, poverty, education, and the environment. We’ll distribute it accordingly. By year’s end, you will have helped support a dozen organizations in the areas you care most about.
The centerpiece of the Foundation will be a lively online community. Active members can join a social network and discussion forums centered on the ten categories of giving, upload videos, recruit new members, advocate for causes and help us choose the new beneficiaries each quarter. We’ll also create and host a multi-author blog of world-class contributors focused on the cause areas, as well as humanism, philanthropy, and the intersection of the two.
Carefully selected for impact and efficiency, the beneficiaries may be founded on any worldview so long as they do not engage in proselytizing. At the end of each quarter, 100 percent of the donations will be forwarded and a new slate of beneficiaries selected.
On the educational side, the Foundation will build the next stage in nonreligious parent education—a nationwide training program for parenting seminar leaders. We plan to have 30-40 people teaching nonreligious parenting seminars in cities across the country within a year.
We’ve begun assembling a stellar cast to guide the Foundation through its infancy. The Board of Directors includes Hemant Mehta (author, Friendly Atheist blogger, Secular Student Alliance board chair), Dr. Wayne Huey (ethicist, educator, author, former Georgia and U.S. High School Counselor of the Year), Trish Hotze Cowan (Sunday School Director, Ethical Society of St. Louis), and executive director Dale McGowan. (That’s me.)
The Foundation will launch in two stages. On October 1 we’ll unveil the pre-launch website, where members can begin setting up profiles and basic donations. On January 1, 2010, we will launch the full site, including the ten featured causes, all profile options, blog, social networking, and the means for members to select and change their preferred distributions.
We’re making no little plans here, and there’s the potential to do something pretty earthshaking. But this is a community thing, or it’s nothing. We’ll need your help.
> what you can do now
There are two ways to stay in the loop as we work toward the Foundation’s partial launch in October and full launch in January:
Facebook users: Click here to join the Foundation Beyond Belief group on Facebook Causes. No donation required — just keeping yourself in the loop.
Non-Facebookers: Click here to put your email on our mailing list.
Either way, sign up and we’ll keep you informed as it takes shape.
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1And the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, and the American Community Survey of the U.S. Census…the list goes on. The facts themselves are not in doubt.
