The Atheists, Agnostics and Freethinkers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign earned the SSA Best Service Project Award for partnering with the Campus Crusade for Christ to repair homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

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Hemant Mehta Chair, Board of Directors

August E. Brunsman IV Executive Director

Lyz Liddell Senior Campus Organizer

Nov. 19, 2008 - The past year has been phenomenally successful for the Secular Student Alliance.  Most notably, our affiliate count has gone up by over 40%.  This report details our 2008 activities, from campus group affiliate support and a great conference to our electronic newsletter and summer internships.

 Direct Campus Group Affiliate Support

We presently have 129* campus affiliate groups in twelve countries. This time last year we had 90; at this time in 2006 we had only 65.  Our affiliates range in size from just a handful of students to groups like the Campus Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists (CASH) at the University of Minnesota, who obtain thousands of dollars a year from their student activities board, and have organized their own conferences. Regardless of size or resources, each group receives individual attention from our staff. Providing these services is the core of our work.

We ask all of our affiliates to update their contact information with us twice a year.  Because we do this, we are able to publish the most up-to-date list of active humanist/atheist student groups of which we are aware .  This helps campus groups connect with each other and makes them more accessible to off-campus groups in the movement and the media.

We have a full time Senior Campus Organizer (SCO), Lyz Liddell, who coordinates the delivery of services, develops new services, advises campus leaders and helps them troubleshoot problems, and maintains our relationships with our affiliates.

Our SCO also supervises our Campus Organizing Interns. These are temporary positions filled by students who work ten hours a week supporting and starting groups in their geographic region.  This spring we had Campus Organizing Interns in Northern California, Southern California, and New York City.

With a subscription to Bacon’s Media Database (courtesy of the American Humanist Association) and technical assistance from the Institute for Humanist Studies’ Communications Director Duncan Crary, the Secular Student Alliance is able to send out press releases for campus events to local media markets. Over a dozen media mentions about SSA campus affiliate groups resulted—many of which we republished on our website (with permission).

Additionally, the Secular Student Alliance itself was covered in the following stories this academic year:

Atheism services on the rise at colleges – 9/21/07
The Daily Free Press – Boston, MA

Faithlessness on the rise? - 11/7/07
Brown Daily Herald – Providence, RI

Cake and controversy for Darwin's birthday – 2/12/08
Brown Daily Herald – Providence, RI

Losing Faith in Modern America – 5/7/08
New Zealand Herald – Auckland, New Zealand

Literature and Other Promotional Materials

We have released an updated revision of our Group Running Guide and distributed hundreds of copies to students interested in starting and running freethought groups.  This is the first major revision to the Guide in over four years.

We printed and sent custom business cards to 22 of our groups over the last school year, along with our brochures, stickers from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and literature from various humanist/atheist organizations. We also mailed our affiliate groups supplies of gel bracelets with "atheist" or "humanist" imprinted on them, and copies of the book Imagine No Superstition donated to us by its author, Dr. Stephen Uhl.

In addition to printed literature we also have a wealth of "how to" information on our website for group leaders to use to better run their groups.  This summer we posted an activity packet on how to perform a service trip . We also created The Exchange , a new section of our website which allows group leaders to post - and share with other leaders - flyers they have developed.  And our website also provides campus groups a sample constitution and resources about succession planning, building group momentum, writing a press release, and welcoming women.

Lori Lipman Brown Director of the Secular Coalition for America and a member of the SSA Speakers Bureau

The SSA Speakers Bureau is an important service we offer to our affiliates. Students are encouraged to bring one of our bureau members to campus for a presentation, debate, or activist training session.  In this past year we helped to directly organize twenty speaking events with our affiliates, also providing $883.69 to assist groups with speaker travel expenses. 

The SSA also helps to organize tours for noted speakers at campus groups around the nation. During this past year we arranged for Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion to speak at campuses in California, Texas, and the Northeast. And in a joint effort with the Richard Dawkins Foundation and the Center for Inquiry, the SSA  played a major role in organizing Richard Dawkins' spring university tour covering New York City, Texas, Arizona, California, Wisconsin and Minnesota.  Dakwins said of the tour, "...the student involvement gave it a buzz that no previous tour has matched." We are helping to organize future Dawkins tours in the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009.

Project Grants

Project grants are given to SSA affiliates requiring funding for their groups' activities.

We budgeted $3,000 for project grants the last year and gave out $2,768.75.  We will be trying several new strategies to distribute more grant money to our affiliates over the next year.

Group Starting Packets

In addition to providing services for existing affiliates, we also provide resources to students who are trying to get affiliate groups started at their campuses.  These packets contain brochures, customized flyers, our Group Running Guide, and thumb tacks.  Additionally, we create a web page on our website specifically about the group-starting effort on each campus, a Facebook Group for the students to use to organize at that school, and a unique email forward which goes to the person starting the group in addition to Secular Student Alliance staff.  We have sent out over 129 packets in the last year; already 23 of those packet requests have resulted in new affiliate groups.

 Web Hosting

We provide technical support for the websites of seven groups that are hosted on the Institute for Humanist Studies’ server.  Most universities give student groups some kind of web space, but sometime groups want to use technologies that are not provided by these hosting environments and web space is not as frequently available at schools in developing countries.  As the Institute for Humanist Studies is ending its web hosting program at the end of 2008, we are looking into other options to continue to offer this service to our affiliates.
 

Rewarding Excellence: Secular Student Alliance 'Best' Awards

Each year at our annual conference, the Secular Student Alliance recognizes the achievements of exceptional affiliates who enrich their groups, campuses, communities, and the secular student movement through innovative programming.  This year, in an effort to provide more support to our most outstanding groups, we increased the amount of each cash award.  Winners for best Service Project, Best Website, Best Media Appearance, and Best New Affiliate received $300, up from $100 in previous years. The Best Overall Affiliate received $500 from the SSA, up from $200 in previous years. This money is to recognize each group for its success in 2007-2008 and to help it carry out even more impressive projects throughout the next academic year.

This award went to the Atheists, Agnostics and Freethinkers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This group’s project was to send eleven members of their group along with nineteen members of the school’s Campus Crusade for Christ group to New Orleans to carry out relief work.

"We were able to spend a lot of time interacting with Christian students from all over the country.  Many were happy, impressed, or even shocked to find out that we were atheists.  After getting to know one another, it became apparent to both sides that it’s possible to put aside our philosophical differences and work together for a greater good.  If we want to improve the images of atheism in this country, I can think of no better way to do it than by volunteering alongside those who might disagree with us.  Complaining about the misconceptions, stereotyping, and discrimination of nonbelievers is one thing we do very well…  Actually working to dispel these is another story.  I am confident that our service project will have the effect of positively shaping their opinion about atheism for the rest of their lives."

We were pleased to give the award of Best Website to the UCLA Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists. Check out their award-winning work at BruinSkeptics.org .

"Function, Function, Function!  The site has to be easy to use and to update.  In planning ahead for BASS’s future, I wanted to make sure that we had a solid infrastructure.  By making the site require minimal maintenance, I’m allowing future BASSiers to focus on the more important facets of running BASS, such as planning educational events.  An added benefit of having the site be easily updateable is that the site actually gets updated!"

To demonstrate this group’s ambitions, it bears mentioning that within days of winning the award, the BASS website had already posted their news, along with their goal of "working on winning the other awards!"

The Best Media Appearance award this year went to the Guelph Skeptics at the University of Guelph in Canada. This group is the first international group to win one of our Best awards.

This group showed up in their campus newspaper once, then a second time. Then they appeared in their local city paper.  Now, and most impressively, they are hosting their own radio show in Canada!  It already airs in Guelph, Victoria, and Winnipeg.  They're working on getting the show syndicated so they can play it across North America.

This group had fallen on hard times and has really turned things around. After all but collapsing, they secured new leadership, changed their mission statement, got new officers, and are now an amazing group. This past year they hosted Austin Dacey, author of The Secular Conscience;  Hemant Mehta, chair of the SSA Board of Directors and author of I Sold My Soul on eBay; and Dan Barker, former minister and co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. They held an event titled "Does the Black Church really serve the Black Community” and invited the executive director of African Americans for Humanism to present on the subject.  They were mentioned in the CBS piece "The Atheist Next Door" and polled UIC students on their feelings about the presidential candidates and religion (then posted these videos and opinions on You Tube).  They declared a War on Truthiness (a term coined by Stephen Colbert which describes things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut," without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination or facts).  You can sign up for their war at warontruthiness.org .  They also held several blood drives throughout the year, including those titled "Give Up Blood for Lent" and the"Vampire Feast Blood Drive" in October.

The Best Overall Affiliate award went to the Tufts Secular Student Association at Tufts University in Boston.

This group has had great success not only in organizing elaborate events on their own campus, but also in seeing beyond their campus to reach out to the larger humanist community in their area.  Over the last nine months of the school year, they organized a debate with Daniel Dennett and Dinesh D’Souza in conjunction with the Harvard University group (also an SSA affiliate); they filmed the entire debate and put it up on the web. (RichardDawkins.net has a great article with links). They reached out to the community to invite professors from Harvard, Tufts, and UMass to come speak to the group on animal ethics, religion, animal testing, and evolution. The group hosted prominent philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, who spoke about secularism and Spinoza, and hosted Dan Barker for an event in the spring.  SSA Speakers Bureau member Ellery Schempp presented to their group about his historic 1963 Supreme Court case to remove school-sanctioned prayer from public schools.

The Tufts SSA also showed up in the media.  They placed articles in the school paper, and the group's president, Pat Andriola, was interviewed there.  Plus, the group's former president Nina Lee was quoted in the Boston Globe. They also have quite a sharp website.

To understand the demographics of their own campus they conducted surveys of Tufts students and found that 30% of the students described themselves as "non-religious;" they then used this statistic to promote their group to students. They also organized a "Coming Out as an Atheist" Day on April 13th.

At the Tufts CAUSE dinner, they raised the most money of any group ($1,616.00) and donated these funds to low income families affected by recent wildfires.  Further involvement in their community included participating in meet-up events with "off-campus" humanist groups in the greater Boston area.  With these and other student groups in the Boston area they co-hosted a big Darwin Day event, and they participated in the Secular Student Activism discussion panel hosted by the Greater Worcester Humanists.  They worked with the Harvard group again to arrange for an event honoring Congressman Pete Stark (the first openly Humanist and nontheistic member of the US Congress).

The 2008 Secular Student Alliance conference was held in Washington, D.C. this June in conjunction with the International Humanist and Ethical Union's 17th World Humanist Congress, the American Humanist Association's 67th Annual National Conference, and the IHEYO's 5th International Youth Conference.  Approximately 510 people participated in the conference; of those, 80 were students.

Hemant on the Hill!

We provided five activist training sessions at the conference and hosted a discussion panel titled "Making the Case for the New Enlightenment: what are the best ways to get people to value scientific inquiry, naturalism, democracy, secularism, and human based ethics?"

As with the year before, the Roxbury Foundation gave us $5,000 in funding towards student travel grants, which we made available to all SSA student members.  We also gained 38 members who had learned about us via the conference.

A handful of the students who attended the conference were able to stick around on the Monday afterward to participate in the Lobby Day organized by the Secular Coalition for America.  These students met personally with their legislators on Capitol Hill to share their views on proselytism in the military and other issues of concern to secularists. 

We publish a monthly electronic newsletter called the eMpirical.  The eMpirical is a vehicle for campus groups to share information and opinions with each other and the larger freethought community. The best way to get a feel for the eMpirical is to look at the most recent issue: http://www.secularstudents.org/enews We invite you to subscribe, if you have not already done so. 

Thanks to the office space made available to the SSA by the Institute for Humanist Studies, we have been able to employ summer interns for the last two years.  In the first summer we had only one full-time intern, but in the summer of 2008 we had three. All of these interns were undergraduate students who were paid a stipend of $200 a week for ten weeks.

This year our interns worked on improving our Group Running Guide, creating a brochure about discrimination against nontheists, reorganizing our Speakers Bureau, making the resources of the Richard Dawkins Foundation more useful to campus groups, improving our resources for groups on small campuses, improving our website, writing content for our newsletter, and more.

In addition to making SSA resources better, the summer internships provide an excellent way for talented young nontheists to learn more about how national nonprofits work to advance our shared values.  Two of the summer interns were able to participate in the Secular Coalition for America Lobby Day mentioned above.

Internship applications for the summer of 2009 will be posted on our website in the spring.

 *Our December 2008 semi-annual group audit reveled that we had 129 active groups.  When this report was initially released, we had 156 active groups in our records.  We stress succession planning as a key part of running a student group, but affiliate groups still close up ever year.  All the same, 129 is still over 40% growth in one year, and we're very happy about it.