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By Brittany Shoots-Reinhard, Beyond Belief Network Coordinator

2013 marked the beginning of the Beyond Belief Network, which merged the existing Volunteers Beyond Belief, Foundation Partners, and Light The Night programs. Since our official launch in May, we’ve grown to 90 teams! Our teams recorded 150 events, and we’re nearing an exciting milestone of 30,000 hours donated to date. We’ve been able to provide teams with free logo t-shirts, grants, and assistance finding service activities and promoting events. Additionally, in September, we announced the winners of our first annual Heart of Humanism Awards (for Volunteers Beyond Belief teams active in 2012).

Beginning in October, we started issuing themed service guides once a month. October’s guide was about Domestic Violence Awareness; November’s guide was Fighting Hunger; December’s was Safe Toy Drives; January’s guide covers Mentoring children and other groups.

We also started recognizing the most active teams with Team of the Month awards. In September, we recognized the Humanist Community of Ventura County for their large number and variety of service events (and great pictures). October’s winning team was Flagstaff Freethinkers, who have both a recurring monthly commitment at a food center and incredible fundraisers, including Seráh Blain’s Blistering at the Margins project, a birthday Crochet-a-thon, and a Family Dance Party. Fellowship of Freethought Dallas was November’s Team of the Month. They’ve been consistently one of our top teams, in Volunteers Beyond Belief, Foundation Partners Programs, and Light The Night. They especially shine with food-related service and fundraisers. December’s team is FreeOK, who joined following the Oklahoma Tornadoes and were very active in cleanup and recovering efforts. They’ve been successful with blood drives, food drives, and the Holiday Humanist Gifting project, a wonderful toy drive that collected nominations and wish lists from more than 100 children, all of whom were adopted by members of their community.

In 2014, thanks to support from members and the community at large (and it’s not too late to give to our Year-End Fund Drive!), we will be able to support more teams with event planning assistance and guides, award more grants and t-shirts, and recognize even more teams with the Team of the Month and Heart of Humanism awards. If you know a local or online atheist or humanist group who would be a good candidate to join Beyond Belief Network, please send them to our website. Teams that join by the end of the day today may submit backdated reports for any service activities from 2013 and will be eligible for Heart of Humanism awards, t-shirts and grants, and a drawing to win a signed book from Dale McGowan or Chris Stedman (one entry per event report received by January 15, 2014).

By Elizabeth Dorssom

Congratulations to the Beyond Belief Network’s December Team of the Month: FreeOK!

FreeOK was chosen for December because of their fantastic record of volunteering and philanthropic programming, particularly the Holiday Humanist Gifting project. FreeOK created this project in November in order to provide gifts to foster children and other needy children. Children nominated for the project provided FreeOK with wish lists, which were made available to volunteering sponsors and as Amazon wish lists. Impressively, as of December 2, 100% of the children have been adopted! However, donations are still being accepted to fully fund the Holiday Humanist Giving project. Any excess donations will be held for the 2014 season unless a crisis occurs, like the tornadoes that struck the area in May. In the event of a crisis, the excess funds will be spent on recovery and disaster relief.

FreeOK also held a blood drive in November through the Oklahoma Blood Institute, with 28 donors and a food drive to benefit the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma—100 pounds of food were collected! They regularly hold drives for food, blood, toys, and books to benefit their community. In addition, they have continued their work cleaning up areas devestated by tornadoes earlier this year. They volunteered several times in the weeks directly following the tornadoes and returned more recently to help sort supplies for the people living in temporary housing in their area.

Team of the Month recognition is a benefit to joining Beyond Belief Network and submitting reports to us about your community service activities and philanthropic efforts. In order to be considered, your group must be a Level One Beyond Belief Network team and you must submit at least one event report during the month. Team of the Month selection is based on the number, length, variety, and documentation (e.g., submitted pictures, blog posts, videos, etc.) of events.

Teams can only be Team of the Month once per calendar year. If your local group does great service work, but isn’t a member of BBN, you can join anytime! In addition to recognition, your team can qualify for free t-shirts and grants. If your local humanist group doesn’t volunteer, but you’d like to start, we’d love to help! For teams new to secular service, we offer tons of ideas, event guides, and advice.

Our second-quarter 2013 slate of beneficiaries clearly resonated with the FBB community–last quarter, member donations broke records and resulted in some of our biggest-ever grants. For the first time, donations to our Humanist Giving program funded individual grants of more than $10,000 (for One Acre Fund and the Innocence Project of Texas). Compare that to our very first round of Humanist Giving in Q1 2010, when the largest grant was $1,640.

Q2 2013 also saw our largest Humanist Crisis Response drive: Members and supporters raised more than $45,000 in the aftermath of the devastating Oklahoma tornadoes. Those donations were sent directly to Operation USA and the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, where they made an immediate difference on the ground and in the lives of those affected by the storms.

And for the first time, donations to and through Foundation Beyond Belief exceeded $100,000 in a single quarter. Here’s a breakdown of all donations for Q2 2013:

	Poverty & Health: One Acre Fund	$10,155
	Human Rights Encore: Innocence Project of Texas	$10,140
	Education: Bernie’s Book Bank	$9,250
	The Natural World: Trees, Water & People	$8,725
	Challenge the Gap: T’ruah	$7,775
	Foundation Beyond Belief	$5,250
	Small Grants: Pathfinders Project	$2,500
	Small Grants: Igwe Project	$1,010
	Humanist Crisis Response: Operation USA	$22,660
	Humanist Crisis Response: Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma	$22,660
	Q2 TOTAL	$100,125

 Many thanks to our members and supporters–YOU make this possible! Don’t forget to learn about our current slate of beneficiaries for Q3 2013. And if you aren’t a member yet, there’s no better time to join!  

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Foundation Beyond Belief Executive Director Dale McGowan has a response in the Washington Post to the TIME cover story in which Joe Klein claims it’s “funny how you don’t see organized groups of secular humanists giving out hot meals” after a disaster:

The response to the tornadoes from the secular humanist and atheist community was organized and overwhelming. The members and supporters of Foundation Beyond Belief, the secular humanist charitable organization I direct, provided 100,000 meals to victims in the wake of the Oklahoma tornadoes through the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma and raised an additional $22,000 for Operation USA. Perhaps the greatest irony of the Klein piece is that Team Rubicon, the outstanding organization he praises in the same sentence that bashes humanists, was the primary beneficiary of Foundation Beyond Belief’s fund drive after Superstorm Sandy.

In addition to FBB, groups including Atheists Giving Aid, Oklahoma Atheists, the Atheist Community of Tulsa, the Lawton Area Secular Society, the Norman Naturalism Group, FreeOK, and the Oklahoma State Secular Organization lent their considerable energies to the effort in Oklahoma. Some raised funds—nearly a quarter million dollars in 10 days—while others gave untold time and energy on the ground. They organized volunteers, resources, and blood drives, teamed with local businesses to feed relief volunteers, and drove bulk donations around the city to distribution centers. They helped clear the rubble of homes, comforted survivors, took people into their own homes, fed them, and clothed them.

Click here to read the full response.

The second quarter of 2013 is drawing swiftly to a close, and it’s your last chance to distribute your donations among our five beneficiaries. To help you make your decision, take a look at this video for a summary of the important work being done by these beneficiaries.

Here’s a quick look at what our remarkable beneficiaries have been up to these past few months:

Our current Poverty beneficiary, One Acre Fund, looks for long-term solutions to fight the hunger crisis in many African nations. OAF provides loans, storage, and insurance for crop failure to help farmers to find their feet and develop their businesses. With a particular focus on the power of enabling women to support their families, OAF serves more than 137,000 families in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi. As of the end of 2012, One Acre Fund had helped more than 137,000 families, including almost 600,000 children.

Trees, Water & People, our Natural World beneficiary for the second quarter, draws a strong link between protecting the environment and protecting the people who live in it. Their projects include the highly successful Luciérnaga program, which brings solar photovoltaic lighting systems to communities, and its Clean Cookstoves project, which has built nearly 60,000 stoves that are safer and more efficient that traditional stoves—and use local materials and labor, creating jobs and improving lives. In the United States, TWP works with Native American tribes to develop environmentally sustainable practices on their reservations. More than 175 Native Americans have received training that they have taken back to their own tribal communities to make them more energy efficient.

Bernie’s Book Bank, our current Education beneficiary, distributes donated books to at-risk children around the Chicago area. Last year, they distributed more than 600,000 books, and their goal for 2013 is to distribute more than 1 million books. Our Science of Giving series took a look at why distributing these books can have such a huge impact on the future success of disadvantaged kids.

Our encore Human Rights beneficiary, the Innocence Project of Texas, is back for a second round—we first featured them in 2011. IPoT works to overturn wrongful convictions, especially through the use of DNA evidence, and educate the public about junk science in the criminal justice system. We took a closer look at their efforts to reform how eyewitness testimony is used in convictions.
 
Our Challenge the Gap beneficiary this quarter is T’ruah, an organization of rabbis who work for human rights. Among other projects, T’ruah works to end injustices in prisons, in North America and around the world, and they build bridges across religious traditions to find common ground and work together for justice. They have worked to prevent the eviction of Palestinian families from East Jerusalem and launched a campaign for Bedouin rights, working again to prevent the expulsion of thousands of Bedouins and to secure government services to several Bedouin villages in the Negev region of Israel.

Our current Small Grant beneficiary is the Pathfinders Project. Next month, the four Pathfinders will embark on their year-long global service mission, volunteering for clean water, education, and human rights projects, and blazing the trail for the Humanist Action: Ghana.

And one last reminder: Our current Humanist Crisis Response program to help those affected by the Oklahoma tornadoes will end on Wednesday, June 26. To donate, click here. So far, we’ve raised more than $45,000 for our crisis beneficiaries, Operation USA and the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma.

Don’t forget to log in to the site and visit the “Manage Donation” area under “Manage Account.” For more information, visit our beneficiary pages for links to their websites and social media.

View a video summary of our Q2 charities

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to our Humanist Crisis Response for those affected by the Oklahoma tornadoes. We’ve now raised more than $45,000 for our two beneficiaries, Operation USA and the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma. Recovery efforts are ongoing, and will continue for many more months, but we will be ending this crisis fundraiser on June 26. If you’d like to donate before then, click here. 

Jamaica Walden, Operation USA’s director of operations, shared this update:

We’ve sent two shipments of generators immediately following the initial tornado and the subsequent one. We also had someone on the ground for the past several weeks assessing the material needs of the community and local organizations on the ground. Our CEO Richard was scheduled to go Oklahoma City a few weeks ago, but his trip was cancelled due to the severe weather conditions still plaguing the area. He is now flying in tomorrow and will be meeting with at least five community-based health and mental health agencies to assess what material and financial needs they have in the near and medium term.

We are modeling our response in Oklahoma to what we did post-Hurricane Katrina, and we’ll be granting funds to local agencies with a need so that they can cope with increased demands from the communities they serve. Operation USA is extremely grateful for the support Foundation Beyond Belief has given us in the wake of this disaster.

Our contributions to the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma provided 100,000 meals for victims of the storms. Karen Paul, RFBO’s manager of foundations and grants, sent us this report:

We opened our Moore distribution center a few weeks ago. We’re currently serving about 150-200 families on a daily basis through this center. I had the opportunity to volunteer at the center last week. In three hours, I worked with people who completely lost their homes, people who suffered major damage to their homes and people who lost their entire food supply because of the subsequent power outages, which in many cases lasted for days. The Regional Food Bank will keep the Moore center open during the long-term recovery effort, which will be months.

We’ve also opened several MARCs, which are multi-agency resource centers, in the other communities impacted by the tornadoes. These communities include Carney, El Reno, Little Axe and Shawnee. These centers are operated in partnership with other community organizations. They are designed to connect those impacted by the tornadoes with a wide range of beneficial services.

Since May 20th, we’ve distributed more than 1 million pounds of food to those impacted by the tornadoes. We wouldn’t have been able to do this without your generous help. Please thank everyone for us!

Remember, we will be ending this Humanist Crisis Response program on June 26. Until then, you can click here to donate.