Foundation Beyond Belief

102 microfinance loans, and that's just the beginning

FBB — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 10:39:25 +0000

By AJ Chalom, Humanist Giving Program Coordinator

Foundation Beyond Belief’s Humanist Giving team has completed the launch of our new Kiva microfinance initiative. This initiative was funded through the Q4 2013 small grant award. The $2,500 seed money for this project was loaned over the course of seven weeks in January and February. After developing a series of guidelines to steer the program, Humanist Giving staff searched for and selected loans through secular microfinance institutions (MFIs) in a variety of countries supporting a wide range of activities, from personal need, housing, and medical expenses to funding businesses, transportation, and food infrastructure.

The intent of this program is to explore the world of microfinance lending within an established lending platform. While there are other microfinance platforms available, Kiva has set itself apart by sheer size and longevity. Some concerns were raised by members regarding certain practices of Kiva, and our Humanist Giving staff took these concerns into considerations while making loan choices.

The Foundation Beyond Belief Kiva account is a member of the Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-religions team. We post the loans that we fund in this group to raise visibility within the group, and we also choose to fund some loans that have been funded by other members of the team.

Here are a few of the loans we funded:

Berta runs a fuel business in Dili, the capital of Timor, Leste (East Timor). Her loan of $600, of which we contributed $25, was used to purchase gasoline for her roadside business. She started her business with her own working capital and now wants to improve that business with a loan through a local microfinance organization. Five members of the Kiva Atheists team were involved in funding this loan.
Rosalie is from the Philippines but works in Lebanon as a housekeeper. She sends money back to the Philippines to help support her family. She applied for a loan to send $1,700 to her family to repair their home after it suffered damage in a tornado. She is part of a lending group that support each other and consists of close childhood friends also living in Lebanon. Rosella has already paid back 20% of the loan. Six other members of the Kiva Atheists team also contributed to this loan.

The MFI that administered Rosalie’s loan for Kiva is Al Majmoua—Lebanese Association for Development, the longest-running Kiva MFI in Lebanon. This MFI works to distribute their loan opportunities geographically and among the diversity of people living within Lebanon, including migrant workers and those in different income brackets, They also strive to give opportunities to people who have been socially excluded from traditional paths to success in Lebanon due to race, income, or nationality.
Lise lives in Les Cayes, Haiti. EarthSpark, the only secular MFI in Haiti, helps entrepreneurs in Haiti to take advantage of green technology and products to build business. Lise is establishing a client base and a business profile, taking out her third, short-term loan from EarthSpark. She is working with solar power light bulbs, charging stations, and efficient charcoal-burning mirak stoves. These products are geared to the significant part of the country that is off the energy grid. The MFI is committed to supplying funds not only for an entrepreneur’s immediate needs but also for a community’s needs.

These are the stories of just three of the people whose loans were partially funded by Foundation Beyond Belief’s Kiva account. There are 99 more stories … and counting.

By the end of February, 102 $25 loans were fulfilled with our initial investment. Loans represented 45 of 73 countries represented on Kiva. There are 15 sectors in Kiva, and 14 sectors were represented in our loans. The most common sectors were Retail, Food, Agriculture, and Services. Loans funded were located across the world, stretching from here in the US throughout Africa and into Mongolia.

One of the benefits of Kiva is the ability to easily track your giving history as well as additional loans you are able to make with money that has been repaid from your initial loans. Just two months after starting our lending, we have already made 8 loans from recycled money in our account. We expect to be able to make almost 90 additional loans from recycled money by the end of the year.

As we loan out our recycled money, these questions fuel our decisions: Is the individual person we loan to important? What biases are introduced by the person choosing the loans? (Do they prefer a particular country or sector that is either deliberately or unconsciously fueling their decisions?) Are loans more effective than giving money directly as grants? Many of these particular questions have been studied, and throughout the project we will explore how our account reflects norms, averages, and differences from other Kiva users.

This project is just beginning. The power of reloaning the same initial capital over and over gives us the ability to impact more people requesting loans through the MFIs that work with Kiva, and we are excited to see how this develops.

BBN Teams complete both new and annual service events

kate.simonson — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 22:15:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Minutello, Beyond Belief Network intern

Foundation Beyond Belief’s Beyond Belief Network is a network of secular humanist groups volunteering in their communities and raising money for FBB’s featured charities and programs. Any group with a public secular humanist or atheist identity is welcome to join, regardless of experience or group size. In March, BBN’s community service theme is Community Gardens.

The Humanist Community of Central Ohio continued a service event they started seven years ago. HCCO set aside a portion of their budget to “adopt” a Bonobo at the Columbus Zoon in their team’s name. This is a small way HCCO feels they can encourage the preservation of endangered species for future generations.

Not to be beat, Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry also continued their service event. Each year, SHL chooses four local charities as their Charities of the Quarter. They collect donations from members and, at the end of the quarter, send the total as one check to the chosen charity as a gift from the entire team. During January-February 2014, the COQ was the SC Woman's Choice Fund. SHL raised $850 for them. In addition to this, SHL volunteered at a local no-kill animal shelter for dogs and cats. Their volunteers performed the daily feeding and cleaning chores so regular staff could complete other tasks.

It was a lucky day for Upstate Atheists when they cleaned their adopted section of Spartanburg Highway. Not only was the weather favorable, their eight volunteers collected fifteen bags of trash. One team member even found a twenty-dollar bill on the side of the road!

Four volunteers from Central Ohio United Non-Theists worked as Housewarmers in February 2014 at the Columbus, Ohio Ronald McDonald House (RMH). RMH provides housing and meals to families with children being treated at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and other area hospitals. Housewarmers work with our guests to provide a home-like environment. This includes greeting guests, assisting with family needs, answering phones, giving tours, assisting with check-in/check-out, preparing guest rooms after checkout, cleaning the facility, doing laundry, restocking supplies and staffing the front desk. COUNT has seven Housewarmers that try to volunteer for at least one four-hour shift per month.

Humanists Doing Good carried out a roadside cleanup on an adopted portion of a busy road with eleven volunteers. HDG bagged numerous bags of trash and are happy to report that repeated cleanings are having a positive impact.

The Humanist Community at Harvard hosted an event to bring attention to the lack of space and resources in Cambridge’s only youth homeless shelter. On any given night, the shelter is forced to turn away more than 200 young men and women. Titled “Stories & Solutions: Youth Homelessness in Harvard,” participants in this event heard firsthand stories from local young adults who have tried to use these services, the professionals who work in the shelters, and the activists who fight for greater systemic change around the issue of youth homelessness in Cambridge. In addition to learning more about this important issue, HCH held a donation drive for socks and underwear for under-resourced shelters, and participated in a letter campaign to support House Bill 135, which calls for increased resources targeted specifically for homeless youth.

Kol Hadash Humanistic Congregation Community Service Committee collected canned food during a carnival in celebration of the Jewish holiday, Purim. They gathered 8-10 bags of canned food which will be given to a local food pantry. Kol Hadash also recycled water bottles that were purchased during the carnival for lunch. The water bottles were donated to a school that’s going to make a greenhouse out of them.

The Humanist Community of Ventura County rearranged thousands of books in the children section of the Simi Valley Library. It was a project the library staff had been putting off for months until HCVC volunteered.

If you are a member of a secular humanist or atheist group and would like to participate in community service projects under the national umbrella of Foundation Beyond Belief, join Beyond Belief Network. We welcome all atheist groups interested in service, from groups with extensive volunteer experience to newly formed groups new to secular service. By aggregating our efforts, we demonstrate that all we really need is charity and goodness to make the world a better place.

FBB announces new procedures for small grant awardees

kate.simonson — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 10:00:00 +0000

By AJ Chalom, Humanist Giving Program Coordinator

Our current small grant awardees were announced along with our first quarter slate in January. We are thrilled to feature two fantastic organizations that are often looking for funds to keep their programs running. Here are our Q1 2014 small grant awardees:

Women's Leadership Project (WLP) is a feminist humanist college prep mentoring program for girls of color in South L.A. high schools. WLP fills a vacuum in a school district that has few programs that specifically address the intersection of sexism, racism, misogyny, and heterosexism in the lives of young women of color. The majority of their students will be first-generation college students. The WLP college-prep curriculum sends girls of color to four-year colleges and universities at above-average rates.

Leo Igwe Research Project: Many women in Ghana accused of witchcraft by their community have also endured torture and beatings. Stripped of their belongings and shunned by family and friends, they are often unable to get medical treatment for their injuries or to ensure their own safety from further harm. Nigerian humanist Leo Igwe, who is currently fighting witchcraft accusations in Ghana, has created a victims’ fund to provide initial support for these women. Foundation Beyond Belief is proud of its ongoing commitment to supporting this fund.

The funds to support small grants come from our members who mark greatest need when allocating their donations. This amount is distributed to both small grant awardees and to beneficiaries in our five giving categories.

When we started announcing small grant awards with our quarter launches, we heard criticism that we were moving away from our mission to feature five beneficiaries every quarter. In a review of this program, Foundation Beyond Belief staff agreed. Therefore, we set a new procedure to recommend and evaluate organizations for small grants.

At this time, potential small grant awardees will be nominated by Foundation Beyond Belief staff and our Board of Directors. Recommendations will be made to the board for final selection when a strong candidate is identified. Some quarters, we may give one or two awards, while other quarters we will give no awards. By the end of each calendar year, we will distribute the small grant allotted funds to phenomenal small organizations.

Small grants awards will now be announced at the end of each quarter (when there are small grant awardees to announce). In the meantime, we congratulate Women’s Leadership Project and the Leo Igwe Research Project for receiving the Q1 2014 small grant awards.

Salvatore Alaimo: We don’t need common belief to drive philanthropy

FBB — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 13:35:27 +0000

By Ed Brayton

Dr. Salvatore Alaimo is a professor of nonprofit management at Grand Valley State University in Michigan specializing in the study of volunteerism and philanthropy. Dr. Alaimo will present at the Humanism at Work conference on the role of philanthropy in American life, the subject of his forthcoming documentary What Is Philanthropy?

Much of your research involves effective nonprofit management. What do you think are the biggest mistakes that nonprofits make that damage their ability to achieve their goals?
One of the biggest mistakes they make is in the well-intended quest to appear to be fiscally responsible, they reduce their administrative, or “overhead,” costs too low. In doing so, they often administratively starve their programs into ineffectiveness. Another is they do not engage enough in consuming the existing body of research they can tap into for recommended practices, effective programming, and the latest findings for their particular service delivery. Another is that resource dependency pulls them into constantly scrambling for the next dollar, to the point that other areas of nonprofit management get neglected. Lastly, one of those areas that typically gets ignored is risk management, which is so critical to the survival of the organization and the safety and wellbeing of its stakeholders, especially its consumers.

What are some of the biggest misconceptions you think people have when they get into nonprofit management?
I think there are several misconceptions. One is simply coming into the work with what I would describe as a “save the world” mentality, good intentions and lots of energy. This attitude can get jaded or broken when people realize they’re operating in an economically and politically volatile environment. Another is that nonprofits culturally don’t operate as businesses. While this may still be true for some, more and more are having to operate like businesses by engaging in social enterprise to generate new revenue streams or become more bottom-line oriented in their programming. Many of the larger nonprofits, including hospitals, are forced to operate like businesses in order to exist in their environments. Lastly, many people still think you can’t earn a living in the field and that is simply not true. The nonprofit sector now employs approximately 10% of our country’s workforce. Salaries are still below those of for-profits, but they have come up a bit and the gaps have been closed a little.

If you were giving advice to someone who is deciding which nonprofit to donate their money to, what are the primary factors they should be concerned with?
Primary factor number one should be how effective the organization’s program(s) is. Who wants to throw away their money at something that is not transforming the lives of the consumers it serves? The second factor should be how fiscally responsible the organization is. Are they wasteful or are they good stewards of resources? Look up their 990 tax return on GuideStar, ask for their annual report, etc. Third, do you believe in the cause you are donating to? What do you expect to feel, receive, etc. from the exchange relationship of your donation?

In a talk you gave in Grand Rapids last year, you featured Foundation Beyond Belief's founder and executive director, Dale McGowan, fairly prominently. What does the Foundation do that you think is helping us be effective?
The Foundation is demonstrating the power of secular humanists in contributing to society. While faith and religion have long been a major influence in giving in the United States, the fact remains that we don’t need religion or the belief in a higher being to help others and contribute to society. I would add that the Foundation is also demonstrating through collaborative efforts with faith-based organizations that there does not have to be the common belief to drive this work but just the common desire and ground to improve our society.

What kinds of things do you think the humanist community can do to expand its philanthropic reach?
I think the humanist community should, ironically, look to the faith-based community and learn how and why they are able to still garner the lion’s share of philanthropic giving. The research tells us repeatedly it’s not the belief in a higher being that is primarily driving this, but instead a sense of community they get from attending their place of worship. I think if the humanist community closely examines the faith-based process they can incorporate some of those aspects into building their community and engaging more people in giving.

To see Dr. Alaimo and the rest of our fantastic slate of speakers, register now for the Humanism at Work conference, July 18-20 in Chicago.

Light The Night research update

kate.simonson — Tue, 25 Mar 2014 10:00:00 +0000

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society recently came out in support of the FDA approval of Ibrutinib for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). The drug works by targeting an enzyme that promotes the growth of certain types of cancers, including CLL and mantle cell lymphoma (MCL; also approved for treatment with Ibrutinib).

The reason that this is a victory for LLS is that LLS funded clinical trials and other studies of Ibrutinib’s usefulness in treating MCL, CLL, and a variety of other lymphomas. Research teams led by John Byrd at Ohio State, Johnathan Friedberg at University of Rochester, Peter Martin at Weill Cornell Medical College, and Jennifer Brown at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have all received support from LLS to research Ibrutinib. Dr. Byrd credits the LLS funding for making the FDA approval possible.

Thanks to your help, over the past two years, Foundation Beyond Belief’s Light The Night Team has raised over $600,000 for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. This money has been spent on patient support and funding research on new cancer therapies, like Ibrutinib.

Last chance to support our first-quarter beneficiaries

kate.simonson — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 10:00:00 +0000

As FBB gets ready to feature a new slate of world-altering organizations, you have a final opportunity to distribute your donations among our five featured beneficiaries for the first quarter of 2014. Take a look at what they have done with our support:

Poverty and Health

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) works to lower national suicide rates by supporting research, educating the public and professionals about mood disorders, and advocating for legislation that impacts suicide prevention. Working in a subject area that can be uncomfortable or even taboo, advocacy and education to combat myths about suicide prevention is a vitally important task AFSP continues to perform.

Natural World

350.org is a global grassroots organizing movement that raises awareness of climate change and the use of fossil fuels. They use social media to educate an entire generation with scientific findings, presented on their nine different websites for countries around the world and just as many Facebook and Twitter accounts using native languages. Their focus on sparking environmental activism at the local level prompted FBB staff to compile a guide for getting involved with their work in your own community.

Education

Safe Passage helps to educate children who would otherwise spend their days scavenging for a living at the Guatemala City garbage dump. Their Educational Reinforcement Program works to remove all obstacles to learning by providing medical care, hot meals, tutoring services, and school supplies, in addition to the flexible classes meant to accommodate working children who support their families. The Pathfinders Project will work with Safe Passage in May and June of 2014.

Human Rights

Ali Forney Center in New York City helps lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth by providing emergency and transitional housing, medical care, employment assistance, and psychiatric support services. The FBB grant was dedicated to their Learning, Employment, Advancement, and Placement (LEAP) program which aids homeless LGBTQ youth in their career advancement by providing professional attire for interviews, college application fees and expenses, and credentialing expenses.

Challenge the Gap

Child-Friendly Faith Project (CFFP) works to protect children of all faith traditions from maltreatment, in particular ideologically driven abuse. At their first conference in 2013, CFFP held speeches by religious educators, social workers, and law enforcement on how to protect children from neglect. During the conference CFFP also revealed its Charter for Child-Friendly Faith, a guide for respectful dialogue between people of differing beliefs based on shared principles of the rights and value of children.

New educational campaign: Protect This!

kate.simonson — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 04:49:11 +0000

The Pathfinders are excited to announce their new educational campaign “Protect This!”. This campaign serves the dual purposes of raising awareness for environmental issues in Colombia and inspiring support for the Pathfinders’ work. Each “Protect This!” update, shared on the Pathfinders Project Facebook page, contains a photograph of the area and any relevant wildlife, and information about the current issues the Pathfinders are addressing. Today, Ben shared some fascinating facts about a highly endangered resident of the Colombian Andes, the Handley’s Slender Mouse Opossum.

Information on the Handley's Slender Mouse Opossum and other animals can be found on Facebook.

Picture via The Zoological Society of London

The river that the Pathfinders often ford to get to work.

New information and pictures will be uploaded daily, so be sure to check in regularly for more gorgeous photos and cool explanations of the world around us.

Projects in Minca are progressing smoothly. The Pathfinders have just finished constructing a composter, to be used by the school where they are working with Misión Gaia to bring lessons about respecting nature to life.

The finished product.

Ben adds doors.

And of course, it is important to take time to appreciate the nature they are working so hard to protect.

Visit the donation page to help in their work protecting this environment and other projects and follow along with the rest of Protect This! on Facebook.

March Team of the Month: Austin Atheists Helping the Homeless

kate.simonson — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 10:00:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Minutello, Beyond Belief Network Intern

Congratulations to Beyond Belief Network’s March Team of the Month: Austin Atheists Helping the Homeless! Although they are a recent addition to Beyond Belief Network, Austin Atheists Helping the Homeless (Austin AHH) are the first BBN team to reach Level One in 2014. AHH hosts a monthly service event in which they collect and distribute basic living supplies to local homeless people in their area. We were impressed with their both their commitment, organization, and effort that is required to carry out their monthly “giveaways.”

AHH was founded in September 2009 by Joe Zamecki, Chuck Clark and Mark Johnson and was the first recipient of a Richard Dawkins Foundation grant aimed at helping secular charity groups. It is thanks to grants like these as well as a small group of volunteers and regular donors that AHH is able to distribute supplies to homeless communities in Austin, Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas/Fort Worth each month.

One secret to Austin AHA's success has been to focus on publicizing their events. They use social media, such as Facebook and send event announcements and updates to several outlets every month. In 2012, Austin’s Your News Now Network even did a live TV interview and report on the team during a giveaway!

Austin AHH had this advice if you’re a member of a secular group or an individual interested in doing similar giveaways to needy people living in your community.

1. Before your team plans anything, check your city’s ordinances regarding setting up and distributing items on public property.

2. Actively recruit from underrepresented groups in your area. Austin AHH credits team diversity for making their giveaways successful.

3. Volunteers often have professional and family responsibilities, so try to keep their responsibilities to a minimum. Some volunteers may only be able to commit to a few events per year while others can attend on a regular basis.

4. Try to rely on certain volunteers to perform specific tasks such as facilitating communication, collecting donations and bringing tables to display items. This way no one particular individual feels pressured to do more than they can.

Team of the Month recognition is a benefit provided by Foundation Beyond Belief to our Beyond Belief Network teams. 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.

Leo Igwe: Ignore the debate of the heart, and you’ve lost the debate

FBB — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 10:29:35 +0000

By Cathleen O’Grady

Nigerian humanist Leo Igwe works in Ghana to fight witchcraft accusations and to support and protect the accused. His project has twice been the recipient of a small grant from Foundation Beyond Belief (in 2012 and 2014), and Pathfinders Project worked with Leo at the Kukuo witch camp last December. Leo will be speaking at the Humanism at Work conference about the situation of witchcraft accusations and how humanism can make a difference in supporting victims, dialoguing with accusers, and slowly dismantling and reorienting witchcraft accusation structures in Ghana and the rest of Africa.

Leo Igwe Skypes me from an Internet café in Ghana. Behind him, the café buzzes with activity, and more than one curious glance is thrown my way. Leo will soon be leaving for rural Ghana to continue his campaign helping people victimized by accusations of witchcraft, but he has cleared a brief window to tell me about his work, alternating between making me laugh uproariously and leaving me in awe of his tenacity and bravery.

“I work in Ghana to preserve my neutrality,” he tells me. Leo is from Nigeria, having been born in a rural village shortly after the end of the Nigerian Civil War – “not even in a hospital” – but his activism caused him to fall foul of the Nigerian authorities, which led to horrifying attacks on himself and his family. “In Ghana I have no track record of activism, so I can easily walk into an office and get answers,” he says.

Leo grew up listening to his parents talking about the potency of the occult, and hearing neighbors make accusations of evil magic. “I was brought up in a community and country where there was – and still is – so much belief in witchcraft,” he says. “I saw firsthand the damage irrational beliefs can do: torture and killing of people suspected of using evil magic. As a child I was made to believe that witchcraft was a fact, but realizing while growing up that it was superstition was liberating.”

Growing up was difficult, says Leo, and he was driven to read about people who had fought for something bigger than themselves. He was inspired by the likes of Bertrand Russell, Nicolas Walter, Paul Kurtz, and Nelson Mandela. “I wasn’t contented with this narrow vision of fighting for yourself, for your family, for your race; we must fight for something bigger,” he says. “I’m not saying that I want to change the whole world, but I am saying that I want to do something.”

Although his work is sometimes dangerous and always heartbreaking, Leo has achieved so many remarkable successes in his career, such as the rescue of Esther, an 8-year-old Nigerian girl accused of witchcraft and kidnapped by a 40-year-old man. After storming the man’s house, Igwe and his team rescued Esther, who is now in a safe private care center. “I felt so good as we led Esther away into safety and humanity,” he says. “I always have this notion that the darkest part of the night is followed by the dawn. Things cannot keep getting worse and worse. I always look forward to a new tide and a new turn of events.”

One of the most important things he wants to convey about his work is that “it is our work, not my work. The global humanist community needs to realize that there are so many poor, uneducated folks out there who are victimized by religious and superstitious extremists and who yearn for care and compassion that flow from reason and critical thinking. Many of these people may not understand, or subscribe to, humanism. They need not. They need humanism at work.”

Any and all contributions to his work help, he adds: “I had no money when I started; I didn’t know how to write articles; and all of a sudden today, I have friends, supporters, all around the world. Anybody who connects with what I’m doing, do what you can. You may not have money, but you have time, you have a website; you can write an article and put it on your blog, you can write a letter to the editor, talk to somebody, lobby – do whatever little thing you think you can do to support my work. You know the best thing you can do. It’s those little bits, that’s how we’re going to build it.”

Leo sees his campaigns to alleviate the impact of witchcraft accusations as an effective way of promoting humanism – not to convert theists, but to put humanism to work for humanity: “I believe there is a sense of compassion that those who do not believe in god or witches have, or can express, by virtue of their disbelief. Putting this sense of compassion at humanity’s disposal is enriching humanity. It should not be misconstrued to be an atheist conversion campaign; it is humanism at its best.” His campaign puts humanism to work for people most affected by superstition and religious fanaticism. “Humanism cannot thrive in a society ravaged by superstition and religious extremism,” he explains.

Showing compassion as a community is the most important next step for humanism, says Igwe. “We won the debate of the mind long ago, but there’s another debate, the debate of the heart: We think that winning the debate of the mind is enough, but it’s not. When you ignore the debate of the heart, and just work on the debate of the mind, you’ve lost the debate.”

“People want to see us at work. That is the gap.”

To see Leo Igwe and the rest of our fantastic slate of speakers, register now for the Humanism at Work conference, July 18-20 in Chicago.

The National Week of Action: From simple blog post to national movement

kate.simonson — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Etan Blass

Last April, as America’s National Day of Prayer approached, many of the millions of Americans who do not pray wondered where they would fit in. Then one day, in a post called “Don’t Just Pray – Choose to ACT!!” American Humanist Rabbi Adam Chalom argued that the humanist alternative to prayer is action, and that we should schedule a day in our communities when we all take action in some way to improve the lives of others.

This message really struck me. So often, when we hear that a family member is sick, or that a neighbor lost his job, or that innocent children are dying of malnutrition in Africa, our instinctive first response is: “I will pray for them.” But here Adam was arguing that, if we truly care and truly want to help those in need, “I will pray for you” cannot be our first response. Our first instinct has to be to do something. Our first response has to be to take action.

I believe this view is one that essentially all Americans, religious and secular alike, intuitively hold. If my neighbor’s house is on fire, even if I believe in the power of prayer, my first response will not be to ask God for assistance. I’m going to call the fire department and do all I possibly can to help my neighbors to safety, and then, only once I have done all I can in my power to take action, if I am the praying type, only then will I ask God to take it from there. And so action is non-denominational. The devoutly religious and avowed atheists alike agree not only that action is paramount but that it precedes any other response.

For this reason, the idea of preceding the National Day of Prayer with a National Day of Action, with its ability to motivate and unite Americans from all parts of the faith continuum, really resonated with me. And so eventually I got up the courage to e-mail Adam and say, “Let’s really do this! Let’s make this as big as it should be!”

Once Adam and I began discussing when to hold the Day of Action, we realized it would be hard to find one day when everyone would be available to take action. And so at some point Adam suggested an even better idea: “How about we do a Week of Action?” We’re hoping that having one week every year when we all make sure to take action in some way to improve the world can bear substantial fruit.

The real “big break” for the National Week of Action was when I contacted Foundation Beyond Belief. In order to take this “little idea that could” and ensure that it would become the big idea that really made a difference, involving FBB, with its Beyond Belief Network of volunteers, was just what we would need to take this initiative to the next level. FBB has been at the forefront of humanist-led charity and volunteering for several years, and I’m so grateful Brittany Shoots-Reinhard and her colleagues at FBB have taken the lead role and are working so hard to ensure the success of this event, so that we end up with as much positive action as possible.

Please join us in choosing to act sometime between April 24 and April 30, 2014, by taking a need in our communities, our country, or our planet and finding some way, large or small, to address it.

Looking for ideas of ways to take action? Check out our Week of Action website for ideas and events. You can also register an event, or share your plans for taking action on Facebook or Twitter.