Volunteers Beyond Belief

September Service with a Smile!

Submitted by Volunteers Beyo... on Wed, 09/28/2011 - 07:00

September has been a busy month for our Teams! Some marked the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 with a Day of Service and Remembrance, and others have continued their regular events. Here's what they've been up to in their local communities!

The Valley Skeptics in the Park cleaned up Will Rogers State Beach on Saturday, September 17th as part of the Heal the Bay initiative. They picked up trash along the beach, to protect wildlife and preserve the beautiful area. This was a great kid-friendly event and this Los Angeles, California based VBB Team is sure to plan many more fun volunteer events that will serve the dual function of teaching kids to help others! Isn't this little volunteer a cutie?

The Harvard Humanists helped organize a major interfaith community service event that took place Sunday, September 11th. In conjunction with a diverse group of Harvard faculty, staff, and student groups, as well as local congregations and organizations, the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard packaged 9,110 nutritious meals to be distributed to food-insecure children in the Boston area.

Over 200 volunteers attended to write letters to legislators in support of hunger relief and formed 4 assembly lines to package the meals. The extremely successful event was featured on Boston's Channel 7 News.

Humanist Community of Central Ohio: Two Years and Bleeding!

Submitted by Volunteers Beyo... on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 16:51

This month, members of the Humanist Community of Central Ohio (HCCO) will get together for our regular Bleed & Feed: a group blood donation service project followed by dinner. But this event is special - on September 15th, the group will be celebrating two years of regular blood donations. We anticipate reaching 80 units of blood donated over the last two years: that's ten gallons of blood and dozens of lives saved!

The Bleed & Feed takes place every eight weeks - the minimum waiting period required between donations by the Red Cross. Participating members gather at the donor center for their appointments, cheer one another on, and then migrate to a nearby restaurant for a post-donation dinner.

The core Bleed & Feed group is about six HCCO members, with others joining in as their work and donation schedules allow. While we had around 3-5 units donated at our early events, the HCCO team now donates between 6-10 units each event between whole blood and apheresis donations. Part of the increase is from our members joining the cause; another reason is our informal competition between our group and the Seattle Atheists' donor team.

The "Feed" is a critical part of the event. Everyone loves to have dinner with good company. We have members join us for the dinner who aren't able to join us for the donation - and that's great! We rotate our restaurant choices so that no one gets bored: we've had Mexican, Indonesian, Greek, tacos, steak, Italian and Chinese. Once we even went to a restaurant that specialized in bison! But we're always careful to make sure there are vegetarian options wherever we go - we have more than a few vegetarians in our group, and we don't want anyone to be left out.

Now accepting applications for Volunteers "expansion teams"

Submitted by Volunteers Beyo... on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 18:37

vbbbadge Volunteers Beyond Belief is now accepting local group applications to join our nationwide network of over 1500 humanist volunteers.

The Volunteers Beyond Belief program leverages the existing efforts of nontheist groups to build a supportive framework for humanist volunteering. Since we nontheists believe there is no supernatural power to take care of us, we're a natural fit for compassionate volunteering.

When organizations in the nontheist community work together, we can achieve our shared goals more efficiently. The VBB program is dedicated to assisting local groups in their volunteering efforts and promotes cooperation between groups, allowing the compassion and generosity of nontheists to be more organized and effective.

As we develop the VBB program, we hope to encourage cooperation and sharing of ideas between Teams with various levels of experience. We also plan to encourage healthy competition between the Teams by holding contests and awarding prizes.

Benefits provided by VBB include:

Assistance finding local volunteer opportunities
Help maintaining a regular volunteering schedule
Volunteers Beyond Belief logowear with option to add group logo
Access to useful tools including a database of volunteering ideas/resources
Access to VBB blog and Twitter account to communicate Team activities
National exposure for local efforts
Additional benefits as the VBB program continues to develop and expand!

Applicants must:

Be established groups with a humanist or related identity
Commit to a regular volunteering schedule (at least once every six weeks)
Commit to a full year in the program
Provide VBB with event statistics such as # volunteers, # hours, etc.
Submit a minimum of one blog entry per event for posting on the Volunteers Beyond Belief blog

Click here to fill out the application form by Sunday, September 18. New Teams will be notified by October 1st. Please e-mail Amanda with any questions!