We are Humanism at Work

Foundation Beyond Belief supported W!SE, Working in Support of Education, as our Education beneficiary for second quarter. Check out this video about their Quality of Life INNOVATIONS program:

Here are some particularly poignant highlights from the video:

•  A New York City high school student walks by an elderly man waiting for a bus. It’s the middle of winter, snow is falling and he is shivering. 20 minutes later, the student walks by again. Same man, still no bus. The student thinks, “This is wrong.” At school, he enrolls in QLI. He researches the bus routing schedule and discovers that not only is the schedule inefficient but also environmentally unsound. He designs a new routing schedule, wins the QLI Competition and earns scholarship money for college. He also lobbies the transportation authorities for change.

• “I really loved that exhilarating feeling when my partner and I finally saw the effects of our implementation. It took us an entire year’s worth of hard work until we were able to get our idea going. When we saw just how effective our implementation was, we were thrilled that we actually contributed to our community!” Rebecca, Staten Island Technical High School

To learn more about our Humanist Grants program, click here. To be a donor, click here. Thank you for being #HumanismAtWork!

Austin Humanists at Work used their 2017 Gold Grant to purchase supplies for 1,000 first aid kits that will included with with their monthly giveaways benefiting people experiencing homelessness. In March, they held an event with Austin Community College's Alpha Gamma Pi chapter of Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society and put together 500 of the first aid kits. In April, volunteers from PTK assembled the remaining 500 kits. Each kit contains five band-aids, four antiseptic wipes, two gauze pads, and two knuckle/fingertip bandages. Austin Humanists at Work expect the 1,000 kits to last for five to seven months! Great work!

You may have noticed that the Humanist Service Corps (HSC) has been silent on social media in the first months of 2018.  We want to bring you up to date on an eventful few months.

As you may know, HSC launched in Ghana’s Northern Region in support of Songtaba, a grassroots women’s rights organization. Over the past three years, we have dedicated ourselves to learning about their programs and methods. In addition to supporting various projects, we helped Songtaba make improvements in every area of its internal operations.

Most HSC projects focused on the community of Kukuo, a sanctuary for women accused of witchcraft and then banished from their communities. In partnership with Songtaba and with your support, we helped return 14 women safely to society and provided agriculture and business training to empower not just the reintegrated women, but the entire community of Kukuo.

Near the halfway point of the 2016-17 service year, violence related to a chieftaincy conflict broke out in Bimbilla (the location of Songtaba’s main office and where the HSC team was living and working). We were already exploring additional partnerships in the Northern Region and had identified a potential partner in Yendi: Bang-Gu Manga Integrated Rural Development Society (BIRDS), another women’s and children’s rights NGO working in the Gnani sanctuary for alleged witches. To ensure no future bouts of violence would affect the HSC team, everyone moved from Bimbilla to Yendi to work with BIRDS.

In light of communication and other issues we encountered with BIRDS, we now feel that the decision to start work with the organization was premature. In hindsight, we would have chosen to send the 2016-2017 team home when we moved them out of Bimbilla while Yvonne and Wendy evaluated the BIRDS organization. The 2017-2018 volunteering team was able to complete some meaningful projects, including a vocational training project that has put six Yendi residents on the path toward a career as tailors, but circumstances prevented the team from being as productive as we had hoped.

In December the 2017-2018 HSC team left Yendi as a mutual decision between the volunteers and FBB leadership. We have now entered a new phase of our HSC program, which is an evaluation and improvement process to determine how best to use knowledge gained from the Northern Region as we transition to other parts of Ghana. While we always expected to bring the HSC program to other parts of Ghana, we never expected it to happen so abruptly. We value our work in the north and are continuing our partnerships there to build on our accomplishments, but do not plan to have anyone based in the north at this time. We hope HSC personnel will return at some point in the future.

After extensive research we recognized the Central region as a potential location and Cape Coast, the capital of the region, as a central base for our team. Yvonne, our HSC coordinator moved to Cape Coast in January to carry on with phase II. Stay tuned for another post soon as we update you on the program’s accomplishments since January.

We’d love to hear your questions and comments. Thanks for your ongoing support!

To be a donor, click here. Thank you for being #HumanismAtWork.

In the month of April the Beyond Belief Network teams took the opportunity of finally having some great weather to get outside for some of their events. 

Secular Humanists of Roanoke spent the day at the 28th annual Pride in the Park Festival talking to people about humanism and handing out information pamphlets to those who were interested. They ended the day with many email sign-ups and many great conversations! Sounds like a wonderful day, Secular Humanists of Roanoke!

Humanists Doing Good also got outside to clean up their adopted section of highway and removed numerous bags of trash from the local environment. To liven things up a bit, they also conducted a bit of a treasure hunt to see who could find the most interesting objects during the cleanup effort. Great idea, Humanists Doing Good!

The youth arm of Humanist Alliance Philippines, International (HAPI) got outside when they organized a clean-up and environmental talk at a coastal community in Bacolod City. The speaker talked about his experiences, knowledge, research and experiments about microplastics and their effect on marine biodiversity and food security. The project is the first of a series that aims to clean up one shore at a time. Congratulations for a successful cleanup and good luck for the ongoing series!

Humanist Community of Central Ohio (HCCO) and Central Ohio United Non-Theists (COUNT) didn't head outside in April because they are committed to their monthly joint events at Community Shelter Board where they are supporting people experiencing homelessness. Keep up the great work!

We also have two new teams to welcome in April: The Humanist Association of Connecticut and Hartford Area Humanists. Keep an eye out for all the great work they are and will be doing in Connecticut! 

If you and your team are interested in joining FBB's Beyond Belief Network, visit our website to apply. Thanks for being #HumanismAtWork!