Chris Worfolk's Blog

There was a bold start to the year when I announced that 2010 was to be the year of CWF in January. I spoke at North Yorkshire Humanists, Leeds Skeptics celebrated it’s first birthday as well as holding one of the best attended 10:23 protests in the world and HAG set a new record. Meanwhile CWF launched it’s YouTube channel and I set David Cammeron right on the subject of Humanist soup kitchens.

Stewart Lee provided a great introduction to February where we launched the Humanist Community of Leeds as one of CWF’s big projects of the year. Meanwhile Atheist Society was busy raising money for charity and serving curry to Pagans. Down South the AHS convention took place in Oxford where Rich did a great job as CWF promo girl.

It was a busy month for CWF in March with the launch of Atheist Stock and the announcement of Enquiry 2010 in the first week! Ricky D shut down the RD.net forums while HCoL launched its blog. Comedian Robin Ince spoke to Leeds Skeptics while I spoke to Leeds Atheist Society on the subject of animal consciousness as well as on BBC Radio Leeds on the Catholic Care adoption agency.

Media coverage of HCoL was building by April including coverage by the BBC website and BBC radio. At Leeds Atheist Society we had a Scientology speaker for the first time ever. We had an Easter special at HCoL before myself and Gijsbert went down to London to discuss CWF with the BHA. The month ended with Reason Week 2010 kicked off by at Leeds Skeptics and the Atheist Society AGM at which John was elected president.

In May the Answers course returned while the country elected a new government. Chris Morris released Four Lions while we released big news about Enquiry 2010. Finally, in a surprise result, my car actually passed it’s MOT.

The big news in June was the Enquiry 2010 conference which was a huge success and featured speakers including A C Grayling, Chris French, Evan Harris, Andrew Copson and many others. Gijsbert was elected onto the University of Leeds Equality & Diversity Committee, I got new housemates and Humanist Week took place.

Much like March, the first week of July was one of launches with the first CWF newsletter being released and the Secular Portal Resource Library being launched as well as us opening the CWF office in Leeds city centre. Leeds Skeptics moved to Mr Foley’s and world cup fever even infiltrated HCoL. Meanwhile Leeds Atheist Society partied hard at their End of Year Ball and we hit Bristol for the AHS AGM.

I started August with two radio appearances, the first on UFOs and the second on psychics. HCoL launched their new branding and we partied down at Leeds Pride. CWF became a registered charity and held it’s first AGM as well as launching the Humanist Chaplaincy Network as well as announcing Sunrise 2010. At work we suited up, something the rest of the world would soon copy in the form of International Suite Up day.

I was out of the country for most of September as I toured Europe with my good friends, Norm, George and Kieran. We made our way through Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Munich, Salzburg, Venice, Verona, Milan, Monaco and La Rochelle. But before we headed off I squeezed in a quick radio interview following Stephen Hawking officially declaring there is no god, represent the University of Leeds Humanist Chaplaincy at the staff fair and oversee CWF’s Sunrise Conference and on return managed to finally achieve Pub Week too.

York Rock Church provided a great start to October while Leeds Atheist Society build on freshers’ week with a classic Make Your Own God event. CWF announced Atheist Stock now had over a thousand images, I saw Stewart Lee in Harrogate, turned 24 and spoke at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire while Gijsbert spoke at the One Life course and joined me in London to meet Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University. I also spoke at Leeds Skeptics and Durham University, raised money for WaterAid and launched the new Perspective website while we finally realised our dream of having a wench and had our first poker night.

If October started well, November was full on cracking as we watched Linkin Park from the sky, followed by Paramore a week later and finished off that week with Gorillaz, curtesy of o2, all expenses paid. I was keeping busy with talks at Leeds Atheist Society and Bradford University, meanwhile my sister graduated. LAS held their interfaith panel and I spoke at their debate on the burqa while HAG launched their new website. We saw the first annual Worfolk Lecture and myself speaking at Durham Union alongside BHA vice-president Richard Norman on the motion “this house has no faith in atheism.” Finally we finished off the month with the LAS Weekend in Edinburgh.

Sex was the subject of December with Intimiate Details launching. HCoL moved to the evening and HAG ran their first holiday food drive. We returned to Manchester on two occasions to watch Meat Loaf from the o2 corporate box and to see the amazing Tim Minchin and CWF launched the Humanist Library Project. Finally we rang in the new year with our traditional New Year’s Eve house party.

On Friday, we held a cocktail party to ring in the new year. Having had a lot of fun making spreadsheets of the various cocktails we could make, compiling it into an ingredients matrix and calculating which cocktails we could make with the most efficient subset of ingredients we eventually came up with a menu of twenty different cocktails.

We then made little menus so that people could cross them off as they drank them, which ended up turning into a competition – perhaps a mistake when the average cocktail contained three shots! Congratulations to Oli for winning, drinking his way through nine of them.

Unfortunately my camera ran out of battery half way through the night so I didn’t get chance to see all the photos Sarann took with it – until I opened them all up this morning and found it full of pictures of Kat’s shoes :S.

All in all, I’m going to label this as “best new year’s ever” because everything worked out so well. Of course the real challenge starts here – I’ve drunk 5 of the 2,800 cocktail recipes I have in my book, which means 2,795 to go…

A week ago the Humanist Action Group did a holiday food drive that I was involved in. Once we had made up the food packs we delivered them to local hostels, dropped them off and went home.

There were no banners, no photo shoots outside the hostels, no informational leaflets carefully concealed inside the packs so that receipts would know which deity had suppository inspired someone to think that helping out your fellow man would be a good thing to do. We just wanted to do a good thing, for goodness’ sake.

Later, a friend of mine brought the issue up.

“A part of me wonders if you can really afford to miss that kind of publicity. You could have been there, during the day, spoke to the manager, got a photo,” he suggested. “Part of me likes the way you guys just do it and disappear back into the night, taking nothing but a warm feeling that will shield you from the next dozens times you refuse to give £2 a month to save a child’s life because you know it’s actually going to pay the salary of the professional fundraiser currently talking to you. But you’re missing such a good opportunity for PR.”

I thought about this for a while. And I think he’s right.

Consider this. The problem with milking such PR opportunities is that it detracts from the moral goodness of the whole situation. It looks like you’re only doing it so you can show everyone you’ve done some good and can feel really good about yourself (of course, if you do good, you should feel good about yourself – that’s how charity works, if people didn’t feel good about themselves for volunteering, nobody would – it’s what we and every other charity depends on!).

Or, for a perhaps clearer analogy, consider corporate giving. Big corporations give, often huge amounts of money away to charity. Ignoring that a lot of this is just a tax dodge there is one big reason why corporations do this – to get their photo taken helping out some kind of good cause, so everyone thinks they are a nice company, so people buy from them and they make more money in the long run. It’s selfishly motivated, they’re only doing it so they can earn more money in the long term.

But lets look again at organisations like the Humanist Action Group. What benefit would we derive from milking publicity out of such situations? Well, profit obviously wouldn’t be one of them. We’re a registered charity and therefore obviously non-profit, we have no shareholders to pay and money is definitely a one way stream away from the trustees pockets than towards them!

So what would we get out of the publicity? Well, we would get publicity in itself. But actually, this isn’t just a good PR shot to help cover up some shady business dealings as it may be for corporations – this is actually our business, we’re getting publicity doing what we do – helping people.

And what would be the consequence of doing this? More people would know about our work, more people would support us, we would generate more volunteers and more revenue – and end up with more resources to help more people!

It turns into a perceptual cycle in which the more good publicity we get from doing good things, the more support we will receive and as it’s a closed system (money doesn’t come out to fund things like shareholders, it’s all invested back into the charity) it just means we can help more people, and get more publicity and help even more people, and so on.

When a charity milks something for publicity, it isn’t helping its own ego (it’s not an evil corporation), it’s not helping it’s shareholders, it’s only helping one cause – the cause it’s trying to help in the first place.

That isn’t to say that from now on it’s all about grabbing as much positive PR as possible at every opportunity. But maybe being open to the idea of making a bit more of a deal about the amazing stuff I see our volunteers doing, wouldn’t be such an evil after all.

At CWF, one of our core aims is promoting education, be it via our courses, our public understanding of science lectures or the online resources and educational material we provide. Today, we are adding a new initiative to this list.

We are creating the Humanist Library of Leeds, a project to build a world standard collection of humanist and naturalist publications in Leeds, United Kingdom. A shining light of reason in the North of England.

You can learn more about the project on its website.

As part of the project, we are looking for donations of items for the library on topics of humanism, naturalism and secularism, and the surrounding subjects – philosophy, theology, natural sciences and other such topics. If you can help the project, please get in touch! You may also want to consider supporting our work by becoming a patron of the library.

You can read more of Chris’s thoughts on the first post of the project’s blog. You can also watch the video below.

On Friday, myself and Norm headed over to Manchester to see Tim Minchin at the MEN.

Tim certainly didn’t disappoint! He is currently touring with a 55 piece symphony orchestra which he uses to great affect and left us all coming away with some brand new favourite Tim Minchin songs, number one for most of us being Sam’s Mum’s Cataracts (btw, the official name of the song is Thank You God if you were wondering).

The best part of the evening though was finding out that even though Aimee had booked her tickets five months ago, and I had booked mine on Tuesday – we were closer to Tim than she was 😀 .

On Tuesday we headed down to Red Hot World Buffet for the Atheist Society’s annual Winter Solstice meal.

Or at least, that is where we thought we were heading. We had decided that we didn’t need to book because only six people had confirmed as coming on Facebook and it was a Tuesday and it was a buffet and it was huge.

However, on the night, 12 people turned up and when Norm, who had gone on ahead of us, asked how long the wait would be on an appropriated sized table – he was told, two weeks! I mean seriously, who holds their Christmas party on a Tuesday and goes to a buffet? Standards these days.

Luckily Spice Quarter were kind enough to fit us in so we enjoyed a high quality buffer after all.

On Monday, the Humanist Action Group of Leeds completed it’s holiday food drive. Having spent the previous two weeks collecting food and donations to put together food parcels for local homeless shelters, the group spend the night bringing together all the food and packaging it up.

In total the group managed 24 boxes, most of which had to be duct taped shut due to them overflowing. The lesson for next time – we need bigger boxes!

Of all the gigs I imagine I would have shortlisted to go to this year, I can’t say Meat Loaf would have been one of them. But when I got a text off Norm saying he had two tickets to the o2 corporate box, I thought to myself, “I could go for a bit of that.”

So we headed over to the MEN in Manchester for a bit of corporate hospitality. Which is a codeword for free bar. Good times :D. The box itself was quite nice, it also included some tasty food (that they come in and steal in the middle of the main gig though) and it’s quite a nice level to watch the show from – could definitely get used to this kind of thing!

With this week being the last week of term, we headed down to OK Karaoke for the social this week. Despite it being a somewhat Christmas themed event though – they didn’t even have Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name”, which was of course last year’s Christmas number one.

On Tuesday, Leeds Atheist Society hosted a talk by James Murray on “Christmas Beliefs around the World” which looked at the true origins of the holiday season and the various, often comical, holiday traditions around the world.