Posts Tagged ‘hcol’

Last Sunday saw the June meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds. This month’s meeting saw a very elaborate array of discussions with topics ranging from The moral landscape and global politics to exactly how you should cook extra thick steak. Big thanks to Gijsbert for his excellent news round up as usual.

Despite many people taking advantage of the four day weekend around May Day and going away, we decided to go ahead with May’s meeting of Humanist Community.

Turn out turned out to be higher than expected and interestingly, we even had a predominantly young audience with over half the people attending being under 30! Discussions were enjoyable, though not particularly heated – when we discussed the royal wedding, everyone just agreed. Great minds and all that I guess 😀 .

On April 3rd, Humanist Community returned due to popular demand. Back in February we had announced that the pilot project was coming to an end and while we had enjoyed our time, we did not intend to continue the project. But after the number of people who announced that they were deeply disappointed in this we decided to extend it’s life to see it’s continued development over the coming months.

At the April meeting, much of the discussion focused around an article featured in The Guardian, written by Deborah Orr claiming that the Census Campaign (the campaign to get those with no religion to actually tick no religion rather than CoE) was militant secularism in action. Surprisingly enough, most of the attendees didn’t agree.

Last Sunday was the February meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds. Discussions were lively indeed – to the point that by the time the discussions first quietened down, most of the meeting was gone and we only just managed to squeeze the news in!

HCoL was always designed to be a pilot project that we could use to gauge the success of such ventures and as such we were keen to play around with the format and see what worked and what didn’t. As such, last month we moved the meetings to the evening and this month we played around with the format.

Instead of having the traditional group, but never the less front led, discussions, we arranged the room into a boardroom style arrangement and skipped the news, taking us straight into a discussion looking back on 2010 and forward to 2011. This gave everyone a chance to talk a bit about their previous year, as well as going over the major events and news from the Humanist perspective.

Feedback was on the whole positive though whether we will pursue this as a regular format we’ve not yet decided. Interesting to see it in action though.

As we announced last month, the Humanist Community of Leeds is now meeting in the evening. The first of which time slots took place last Sunday where we discussed the differences and similarities between humans and animals as well as the concept of human rights.

From December, the Humanist Community of Leeds is moving it’s meetings to the evening, with doors opening at 5:30pm. We were really impressed with how many people turned out this morning but we believe we can probably double attendance by moving to a later time, based on the feedback we have, so this should make for even better events.

The World Cup manages to get everywhere – and arguably so it should – though it was surprising to find that it even made it as far as the Humanist Community of Leeds with Gijsbert dressing up in all orange to support his home country, The Netherlands.

Last Sunday saw the May meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds. It was well attended and all those who spoke to me gave positive feedback – indeed a record number of people stayed on for Sunday lunch and we had to have the restaurant expand the area we are normally in!

Last Sunday we saw the second Humanist Community meeting. It was a great success, things ran a lot smoother than last time (which I’m taking as a big victory and things ran very smoothly the first time to be honest), we matched our initial attendance which is always a challenge at a second meeting and the meal in the restaurant afterwards as excellent too. Roll on April!