Secular Student Alliance: Atheists, Humanists, Agnostics & Others - Campus Groups

Announcing the New 2008 Group Running Guide

4-November-2008

If your group is an affiliate of the Secular Student Alliance, chances are you’ve come across our Group Running Guide. It’s the handbook we send to anyone looking to start a group on their campus, containing a wealth of information on starting and maintaining your secular group.

So you can imagine that we’re excited to announce the new 2008 edition of our Group Running Guide!

Affiliation Renewal

12-October-2008

Click here to Renew!

It’s Affiliation Renewal time! All groups which are currently affiliates of the Secular Student Alliance should have received an email with a link to their group’s Affiliation Renewal form. This is a short form that provides us with up-to-date information about your group and its activities.

Secular Alliance at Indiana University Makes a Statement

19-September-2008

This was Sarah Kaiser's statement for the Secular Alliance of IU (at Indiana University Bloomington) callout meeting on September 11, 2008. The group, of which she is president, decided that it should have a semi-formal callout meeting at which the president stood up and spoke about what the group is and what they want to do, as well as talk about upcoming events and activities.

You might be wondering: what is the Secular Alliance and what does it mean to be "secular"? Secular is a word that encompasses many nonreligious philosophies, which include atheism, agnosticism, skepticism, freethought, and humanism, among others. It can mean many different things, but in the context of our group, secularism is simple—it focuses on the assertion that one can lead an ethical, fulfilling, and complete life without religion or supernatural belief. It is also a social ideology in which religion and supernatural beliefs are not seen as the key to understanding the world and are instead segregated from matters of governance and reasoning. Thus, secularism can be involved in the promotion of science, reason, and naturalistic thinking.

Student Voice Follow-Up: University of Michigan SSA

31-August-2008

This month, Leslie Zukor had the opportunity to interview Patrick Julius, the founder and President of the University of Michigan chapter of the Secular Student Alliance. He is 20 years old, a Dean's Scholar, and a third-year honors student studying Cognitive Science at Michigan. He is also active in Bilateral, a student group for bisexuals, and the Progressive Alliance, a coalition of liberal campus organizations. His hobbies include writing and photography.

This interview is a follow-up of a 2007 Student Voice interview with Julius in the Secular Student Alliance eMpirical. The original was published in January of that year and can be found here: http://www.secularstudents.org/node/561.

"Children of the Border" Provides Humanist Service Opportunity

12-August-2008

Sebastian Velez, fellow SSA member and Harvard University evolutionary biologist, leads an organization serving a community of Haitian-descent sharecroppers along the Dominican Republic-Haiti border. The people of the community served are among the poorest in the Western hemisphere, each family living on less than $2 a day and in the worst misery imaginable: houses made out of sticks and mud, water access from cattle ponds hours away walking distance, children suffering from chronic diseases that should be easily and cheaply treated, rampant illiteracy and lack of opportunities for basic education, high infant mortality, and high fertility rate.

Save the Date: Darwin goes Biennial

6-August-2008

Darwin Day is coming! It’s not too early to start planning how you are going to celebrate! This year’s Darwin Day Celebration is special, indeed, as it marks both the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin as well as the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin Of Species. If you are ever going to celebrate Darwin Day, this coming year will be the time to do it.

Milk It for All It's Worth: Raising Funds on Campus the Easy Way

2-July-2008

Andy Buttler is vice chair of the Secular Student Alliance board of directors and has served as finance director for Campus Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists at the University of Minnesota since 2006. At the 2008 SSA Conference, he gave this presentation on making the most of your university's funding options.

Why Raise Money?

Although it seems like a no-brainer, every group should ask this question as the starting point for any fundraising efforts. Plenty of groups do get by without spending a dime, and you should first consider what things you might use money for and how much money you would need. Having goals in mind can also help provide the first steps towards finding sources for that financing.

There are two main ways for a campus group to use money: projects and operations. Projects involve things like bringing in speakers, implementing service projects, hosting debates, holding pizza parties, and providing printed literature. Operations involve things like office space and utilities (although some campuses provide office space for their groups), Internet hosting, and other costs that may be needed just to keep your group running.

It’s important to clearly identify your costs before you head into a fundraising plan. Most sources of funding for non-profit groups only help if you have a specific project that you can say you’re planning for.

Where Do You Get Money?

There are five major sources of funding that your group can utilize. The most accessible and plentiful resource is your university’s student activity fees. Project grants, local adult groups, fundraisers, and member dues can also help with financing. We’ll show you how all of these sources usually work, how you can capitalize on them, and some of the disadvantages they might involve.

Student Activity Fees

Student activity fees are the largest source of funding for your group. Your university holds a pool of money funded by a mandatory fee collected from all students, and this money helps finance facilities (like your gym and pool), student services (such as a night escort service), and student organizations. Almost all colleges and universities assess activity fees. A student organization can apply for funding from this pool, and usually a committee of peers and/or administrators decides whether or not to approve a request.

How much should your group ask for? As much as you need! However, be sure you have specific plans to actually use the money. You can often access other groups’ budgets and proposals through your university’s website, and this information can help you determine if your request is realistic by comparison.

When asking for money from your university, it’s important to say not only what you plan to use the funds for, but also why your group is there in the first place. You need to justify your group’s existence and point out the benefits it has for the campus.

This isn’t as hard as it sounds. First, explain who your group contains: atheists, agnostics, humanists, rationalists, freethinkers, skeptics, deists, Unitarian Universalists, and more. We represent a minority (about 3-9% of the U.S. population), and universities love diversity. We face significant opposition from religious groups and often don’t get a lot of support from our communities, so your group is providing an important resource for nonbelievers. Reinforce your group’s mission statement and any goals that involve education, advocacy, community, or other societal benefits. Also, don’t forget that you are contributing to the marketplace of ideas on your campus – you are an educational resource!

Project Grants and Local Off-Campus Groups

Project grants and local adult groups have guidelines very similar to student activity fees. Budget out your project, ask for a specific amount of money, and justify your existence to explain why your group and projects are worth funding.

You can find project grants in many likely and unlikely places. The Secular Student Alliance has a project grant fund [link], and your university or specific departments within your university may have grants available to help with specific projects. You can also sleuth around to see if your city or state has grants available. Some projects may qualify for grants from truly unusual sources like U.S. government agencies or non-profit groups.

Off-campus groups usually don’t have any particular process for application; try sending an email and showing up to a board meeting with your proposal. The level of support off-campus groups are able to provide varies. Some groups don’t have a lot of money but are also lacking in activities and might be willing to spring for an exciting event. Other groups are very active and have a significant amount of money that they would be able to share. Off-campus groups can be valuable partners, and it is often worth building up a relationship with these groups in your area.

Fundraising and Member Dues

Fundraisers are another source of income, but they often require more effort for fewer returns than some of the previous methods. You should first check with your university to make sure you are complying with any fundraising requirements or restrictions.

A hint here is that atheists can’t resist quotations – you might try working them into your fundraiser (favorite quotes on t-shirts, for example). You can try attention-grabbing events like renting a carnival dunk tank to let participants “baptize the atheist.” Pastafarian Spaghetti Feasts have gained popularity on campuses across the U.S., and some have included contests for the best pirate costumes!

Member dues are only a small portion of a group’s income. Some groups charge dues for every member, some don’t charge dues at all, and some have a two-tiered membership plan in which dues-paying members have special benefits such as voting privileges.

Best Awards 2008 Winners

29-May-2008

Each year at our annual conference the SSA gives 'Best Awards' to our outstanding affiliate groups for the following achievements:
Best Service Project, Best Media Appearance, Best New Affiliate, Best Website, and Best Overall Affiliate.

The award comes with a cash prize of $300, and $500 for the winner of Best Overall Affiliate.

This years winners are as follows:
Best Service Project-University of Illinois Champaign Urbana -Atheists, Agnostics, and Freethinkers. Their project was to send 11 members of their group along with 19 members of the schools Campus Crusade For Christ group to New Orleans to carry out relief work. Their time in New Orleans was primarily dedicated to gutting damaged houses and building new ones. This included work such as putting up siding, painting exteriors & interiors, laying down flooring, erecting fences, running electrical wiring, installing sheetrock, landscaping, and finally removing moldy drywall and debris.

IHS Grant Backs Ugandan Student Humanist Group

18-May-2008

Betty Nassaka

The SSA has affiliates all over the world - including several in Africa. Betty Nassaka, chairperson of the Ugandan Humanist Effort to Save Women (UHESWO), sends along this brief summary of her group's successes on campus, as well as some great photos!

The Institute for Humanist Studies (IHS) gave UHESWO a grant to establish its branch at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. UHESWO is to use this grant to implement a one-year project aiming at empowering female freshmen at Makerere University to embrace the humanistic virtues of human rights, self-help, self-reliance, tolerance, courage, science and reason.

In Reason We Trust?

17-May-2008

This story originally appeared in The Daily Cardinal (the campus newspaper of the University of Wisconsin at Madison) on 04/03/08, and is used by permission.
Article by Sajia Hall of The Daily Cardinal.

Between the religious right and violence in the name of religion, do atheists on campus have a prayer?

As an organizing member of AHA, the UW-Madison organization for Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics, Nick Jikomes hears arguments against atheism all the time. One of the most common is that atheism requires belief and is therefore a religion.

Jikomes, however, has an answer.

Tips for High School Freethought Groups

17-May-2008

Stephanie Kirmer ran a high school freethought group in Lawrence, KS. She is now finishing her Masters degree in Oregon. She helped a lot of high school students run groups at their schools while working with the SSA, and has a few ground tips for those groups.

1. Get Help. Having a sympathetic faculty member or teacher is very useful. Ideally, this is someone who would go to bat for you if the school administration gets in your way, but even just having someone who doesn't mind signing forms or paperwork to get official recognition of your group is helpful. Think about the science or math teachers, or anyone you think might be sympathetic, and approach them one-on-one about the issue.

2. Stand Strong. Be prepared for resistance, especially in more conservative areas. If you're intending to seek out official status as a group, you may run in to trouble from school administration, parent groups, religious student groups, other students, or even the school board if it gets to that. You might get lucky and find that no one is bothered, but these are the areas I would watch out for just in case. If you do run into one of these obstacles, Stephanie is glad to offer advice and can be reached at .

3. Why Are We Here? Figure out what the purpose of your group is. Do you want to talk to other, nonsecular students about freethought? That can be tricky: oftentimes in high schools they will frown on 'proselytizing' (for anything other than Christianity). If you do go that route, many schools have the caveat that nobody outside the school/student body can make overtures about these things to students, so keep that in mind if you invite anyone from the community or farther afield to speak. (Again, these rules rarely are applied to Christian groups. Unfortunately.) But if you want to just be a group for freethinking students to get together, that's a lot easier. Also, if your group is non-offensively present, and visible, you'll recruit purely by being there. People who are questioning or explicitly secular will join you once they know the group exists, whether via word of mouth or flyers or whatever.

4. What To Do? Finding times to meet is part of the challenge; finding what to do during those times can be another. My high school had a period once or twice a week where you had study hall/group meetings and students who were in groups could have that time to talk. Your school may or may not have the same sort of system; you may have to meet outside of school time. The system you have will determine a lot of what you do. In school time, you can have group discussions about topics of interest and relevance to secularism – that list is about endless. Read an essay and discuss it, or share personal experiences being freethinking teens, etc. Outside school time, you can do many other things – a field trip to a science museum, visiting the nearest university to talk to philosophy professors, or meeting with the nearest college secular group, etc. Darwin Day parties are fun, as well as plenty of other things (secularseasons.org is a good resource). If you think creatively, you won't get bored.

5. Where is Everyone? Another problem you may run into is member turnover. In college, some people are around forever – they just stay in the area, whether they graduate or not, and they form the base for a lot of groups. In high school, generally only people who are actually current students are allowed to be members of groups, so after four years or less, they're gone. That's one reason that I highly recommend writing down what you do and what your plans are. The more you have on paper, documented, the easier it is for the next set of students to hold things together.

6. Mind your Manners. If I may be so bold, please don't let your group become an arguing club. There's a debate team for that. But members of secular groups, at any age level (and especially females), often find groups where it's all yelling and bickering unpleasant. Make it a group where you're in it together, not fighting against each other. Most secular teenagers have few enough sources of support as it is.

Welcome New Affiliates!

15-April-2008

The SSA is growing faster than ever! Since the beginning of March, we've gained thirteen new affiliate groups. Let's welcome our new members!

TCNJ Secular Student Alliance
THE COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY
Facebook Page
Group E-Mail: TCNJ(AT)secularstudents(DOT)org
610 Cromwell Hall
Ewing, NJ 08628                Affiliated on 3/4/2008

University of Melbourne Secular Society (UMSS)
UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
Website: union.unimelb.edu.au/clubs/special-interest#sec
Facebook Page
Group E-Mail: umsecsociety(AT)gmail(DOT)com
119 Wallace Rd
Christmas Hall, VIC 3775            Affiliated on 3/5/2008

Atheist Student Organization
SACRAMENTO STATE
Website: groups.yahoo.com/group/ASO_CSUS/
Group E-Mail: aso_csus(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
Sacramento, CA 95814            Affiliated on 3/6/2008

Secular Student Alliance
UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
Website: udel.edu/stu-org/ssa/
Group E-Mail: frank(AT)udel(DOT)edu
Secular Student Alliance
218 Trabant University Center
Newark, Delaware 19716            Affiliated on 3/7/2008

Scientific Understanding and Reason Enrichment (SURE)
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA BARBARA
Facebook Page
Group E-Mail: SUREucsb(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
6750 El Colegio Rd. #248
Goleta, CA 93117                      Affiliated on 3/11/2008

Reason Inquiry Skepticism Empiricism (RISE)
CITRUS COLLEGE
Website: www.myspace.com/rise_citrusfreethinkers
Facebook Page
Group E-Mail: citruscollege(AT)secularstudents(DOT)org
4922 N. Enid Ave.
Covina, CA 91722                Affiliated on 3/12/2008

Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics @ Stanford
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Facebook Page
Group E-Mail: stanford(AT)secularstudents(DOT)org
609 Escondido Rd Apt 226
Stanford, CA 94305-7021            Affiliated on 3/16/2008

Campus Atheists and Agnostics
MINNESOTA STATE UNIVERSITY - MANKATO
Website: www.mnsu.edu/supersite/directories/rso/details.php?name=Campus+Atheists+and+Agnostics
Facebook Page
Mankato, MN 56001                Affiliated on 3/24/2008

Guelph Skeptics
UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH
Website: guelphskeptics.freethoughtassociation.ca
Facebook Page
Group E-Mail: guelphskeptics(AT)gmail(DOT)com
36 Brentwood Dr.
Guelph, Ontario N1H5M7            Affiliated on 3/26/08

Humanist Student Association
INDIANA UNIVERSITY - BLOOMINGTON
Facebook Page
Bloomington, IN 47401                Affiliated on 4/2/2008

Secular Penn
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Group E-Mail: pennfreethought(AT)googlegroups(DOT)com
4002 Chestnut St
Philadelphia, PA 19104                Affiliated on 4/2/2008

Atheist & Agnostic Alliance
University of London-Royal Holloway
Facebook Page
Group E-Mail: adrianhayter(AT)gmail(DOT)com
B1B01 Wedderburn
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX                Affiliated on 4/2/2008

Secular Student Organization
DAKOTA STATE UNIVERSITY
Website: www.dsusso.org
Group E-Mail: derekhenkels(AT)gmail(DOT)com
410 SW 1st St
Madison, SD 57042                    Affiliated on 4/3/2008

Richard Dawkins in Madison, WI

29-March-2008

Phil Ferguson is one of the newest members of the Secular Student Alliance's Board of Directors. On March 11, he saw Richard Dawkins speak in Madison, Wisconsin.

Richard Dawkins is on a speaking tour to promote the paperback release of The God Delusion, sponsored in part by the Secular Student Alliance. On March 11th, Mr. Dawkins was in Madison, WI and I only had to drive five hours to see him. I arrived in Madison early to take Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and Debbie Goddard from the Center for Inquiry to lunch. Upon my arrival, I was informed that Mr. Dawkins would also be joining us.

Ellery Schempp Speaks at the University of Texas-Arlington

29-March-2008

This article originally appeared in the Feb. 29, 2008 issue of The Shorthorn, and is used by permission.

Article by Jhericca Johnson, The Shorthorn staff

Dr. Ellery Schempp, Senior Partner for Harvard Consulting Group, speaks about religious prayers in school Thursday at the University Center Red River room. Schempp is known for the 1963 Supreme Court case of Abington School District v. Schempp, in which school prayer was ruled as unconstitutional. (c) The Shorthorn: Rasy Ran

When Ellery Schempp’s high school required students to read ten Bible verses every morning “to learn valuable moral lessons,” he began to wonder if the students of Abington High School had fewer morals than students everywhere else.

Schempp was the main student involved in the 1963 Abington School District v. Schempp Supreme Court case which declared school-sanctioned Bible reading unconstitutional. He spoke Thursday in the University Center Red River Room to tell the campus community about his experience.

At the event, which was sponsored by Freethinkers of UTA, Schempp told students how the event occurred and his thoughts during the case.

In 1956, Schempp was a student in the Abington School District in Abington, Pennsylvania, and was told to read Bible verses every morning. On the Monday after Thanksgiving break, Schempp decided to bring a copy of the Quran to school and read it instead. His said his decision came from reading the First Amendment of the constitution and his own religious choice — Unitarianism.

“There is nothing in the constitution about the Bible, and there is nothing in the Bible about democracy,” he said. “And the word ‘religion’ is only in the constitution twice — in the First Amendment and the Sixth.”

After bringing the Quran to school and reading it quietly to himself, Schempp stayed seated while his classmates said the Lord’s Prayer and stood up for the Pledge of Allegiance. Immediately, his teacher asked him why he was disobeying.

Once he explained his position, Schempp was sent to the school disciplinarian.

“He told me that there were 1,300 other students following the rule and that it was all a matter of respect,” he said. “He said that he felt like I was being disrespectful.”

Read our other coverage of
Ellery Schempp's case!

Darwin Day Celebrations at UTA

28-March-2008

Secular Student Alliance Board Secretary Becky Robinson leads the Freethinkers of the University of Texas at Arlington. Here, she writes about her group's exciting and successful events on Darwin Day this year.

As we did last year, the Freethinkers of the University of Texas at Arlington planned an all-day Darwin Day event on February 12th, the 199th birthday of Charles Darwin. We hoped to spread awareness of science and education, mixed in with some political activism and good old celebration with birthday cake!