Revitalizing Humanism: A New Era of Community Empowerment with Jake Via

[0:04] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. We have a conversation with Jake Via, the new full-time organizer for the American Humanist Association. We find out what an organizer does, the best part of his job, and how to draw younger people into organized humanism. Glass City Humanist is an outreach project of the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie, building community through compassion and reason for a better tomorrow.

[0:40] Music.

[1:00] Joining us today is Jake Via. He is the Organizing Director for the American Humanist Association. He’s dedicated to building and mobilizing a strong grassroots network to advance humanist values across the country. He has nearly two decades of experience in community engagement, program development, and leadership at the YMCA and Playworks, and he has a deep understanding of how to bring people together around shared values. Thank you for joining us today, Jake. Yeah, I’m really glad to be here, Doug. Uh, people are always interested in an origin story. So how did you arrive at the AHA?

[1:37] Yeah, that’s a great question. I, uh, you know, I grew up conservative as a conservative Christian Calvinist, if you’re into the specific sect of theology. Uh, and that was my whole world. I had entire books of the Bible memorized. Uh, in my early twenties, I started meeting people who weren’t raised to believe the same things that I was raised to believe. And my religion said they were going to burn in a terrible fire forever. And I didn’t really see a loving creator in that, which made me start asking questions. But at the same time, I was training to be a missionary. And I thought, you know, I need a better testimony. So I’m going to walk away from this so I can look back on it and see it as the truth I know it is. But the further away I walked, the more comparisons I saw with all the other major religious texts that I had read like the Tao Te Ching and the Baghdad Gita and the Book of Mormon and the Quran and um.

[2:37] And I, I just didn’t see truth in that anymore. So, uh, so I walked away, I went through an angry atheist phase in my, you know, mid twenties. Um, and then, uh, but I was still a deeply value driven person. Uh, and so I went looking for the right thing for a while. I think I was a Tao inspired Christian flavored deist while I was on my way out. Um, and then, uh, and then I said, I don’t believe in you, God. And then I realized the irony of that and said, I just don’t believe in God. And then I found humanism and humanism made immediate sense to me. I am a good person. I am an ethically driven, cause driven individual.

[3:17] And so in my early twenties, about 15, 16 years ago, I identified as humanist and, and then I didn’t really engage with it at all. After that, I think I was subscribed to AHA emails. Actually, our email system says that I unsubscribed from our emails and around 2016. So I know I was subscribed for a while. Um, but there wasn’t anything about the, the movement that really pulled me in, uh, and my day-to-day life, I was working at nonprofit. So I worked at the YMCA, worked at an organization called Playworks, and I was living my values all day, every day. I got to talk about empathy at the Y all the time. I got to talk about empathy at Playworks all the time. I got to, at the Y, uh, they train us to be what’s called a cause-driven leader. Everybody at the Y is a cause-driven leader and your cause is building community and it’s creating a space where people feel safe, where people feel comfortable, where people can have a third space. Is that the why?

[4:14] And at Playworks, we were building safe schools where we believed in the power of play to bring out the best in every kid. I love play. I think that when I know for a fact that when we play together, the same part of our brain that’s associated with empathy lights up. Play literally teaches us to be more empathetic humans.

[4:33] So I did all of this. And then Around seven years ago, I was in a motorcycle crash. I had a brain injury, I had to learn how to walk again. And while I was healing from that.

[4:42] I had to quit my job as I was executive director of a YMCA summer camp way up in the mountains of Utah. Because I couldn’t walk and because I couldn’t remember meetings that I had run that morning, I had to quit. And while I was healing from the brain injury and learning how to walk again, I thought, you know, I’d really like to make money for the first time in my life. And I was living in Salt Lake City where Silicon Slopes and Silicon Tech, there’s a lot of tech companies there. So I applied for tech jobs and I got hired at a tech company. And my first tech role, I immediately made twice as much as I had made in as an executive director in the nonprofit world. And I did that for six years. I was financially successful and miserable, completely miserable almost every day. If you go back and look at my LinkedIn from the early 2020, 2021, almost every post was about empathy because that whole sector is, they don’t know what it means. They’ve never heard the word. uh you know it’s like some foreign food to them or something um everything’s about chasing quarterly targets and so you got to be better this quarter than you were last quarter and um it was just such a contrast to the life that i had lived previously and then during the election last fall had already been miserable for a long time i’d already been looking at at doing something different.

[6:06] And then when the unthinkable happened, I told my wife it was time to go back into nonprofit work. And so I started looking and I saw the organizing director at American Human Association. And from the moment I read the job description, it was like it was written for me.

[6:24] And I told my wife, this is the job. And she said, well, don’t get cocky. I said, no, no, I’m going to get this one. And so I applied. They put me through the ringer. They’ve got a really great hiring process here. There were 120 other applicants. And as part of the hiring process, they actually had us do an on the job thing. So I got to work with Humanism on helping to recruit a legislator to the Congressional Freethought Caucus as part of that and with a couple other groups as well. So they could kind of see my work style and how I communicated with local groups. And so I started in March and it’s been a whirlwind since then of learning what’s working and what’s not working. This role was never a full-time position at the AHA, but when Fish Stark started last year, he saw a real need to support and better support our local communities and our local efforts. So I haven’t had a budget yet this year. We’re going to get me a budget to work with next year. But I’ve spent the last five months getting to know all of our local groups, find out what’s working what’s not working what resources are needed building out those resources building out new training and it’s been it’s been amazing to see what’s currently happening on the ground and how much potential we as a community have.

[7:41] Yeah, when I was talking to Fish a few months ago, because he helped out with my 100th episode doing a voiceover for it, you know, I made to tell him that I really like the direction that the AHA is going, and it is getting very active. It’s always been known to be a bit skew older, stodgier, you know, kind of slow on the uptake. And, you know, there’s just a lot of vigor and energy now. And you guys are getting really aggressive, which I really like in a good way, aggressive in a good way. With empathy. With empathy, right. And compassion. Yeah. And reason.

[8:25] And I really like that. And for those that may not know, what exactly does an organizer do for a group like the AHA? It’s a great question. I think my job, a typical organizer is on the ground helping run mobilizations, right? And building local advocacy efforts and lobbying efforts. My job at the national level is maybe a bit of a misnomer. I end up doing a lot more training building and resource collaboration building and a lot more kind of community support. So a typical day for me looks like spending an hour or two hours on calls with local group leaders around the country, of which we have 200 plus of those. So that’s a lot of people to connect with.

[9:15] And then a lot of internal development on building out training resources and building out materials. I also do a lot of partnering so I’m kind of the lead on our partnerships with American Atheists with partnering with other organizations like Camp Quest and Navigators USA a secular scouting program and looking for other resources like that and other partners that we can develop that help put programming in place for building strong humanist communities on the ground there’s so many resources already available but nobody’s ever really compiled them so I’m a lot of my job is compiling that’s that sort of stuff figuring out how we build better online communities so i also run our discord and our reddit uh and try to build online community that way uh.

[10:00] And then we’re building a whole bunch of new ideas. So we’re launching a humanist creator fund in the next couple of weeks where we’re sponsoring secular humanist YouTube creators that have hundreds of thousands to millions of followers to help drive awareness about what humanism is. We think that there. Was that the was that the thing that Hemet Mehta kind of demanded at the conference? Yeah. So the story behind that’s kind of funny. We met Drew McCoy of Genetically Modified Skeptic at the American Atheist Conference about a month before that. And Fish and I were with him at the bar.

[10:36] And I said, you know, we really want to build, and I just said it and made it real. I said, we want to build a humanist creator fund. We want to sponsor you so you don’t have to take money from Squarespace or from some organization or company that doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do. And Drew got really excited about that idea. And I said, hold on, man, we don’t have a budget for this. Like, this isn’t real yet, but like, know that this is something we want to do. And then when Hemet was on stage at our conference, he was, he was telling the audience, if you want secular content, you have to support secular content. If you want to read more, if you want more people saying what you believe, you have to support these people. And under the table, I was texting our communications director and I was texting a court buyer and I was texting fish Stark. And I was like, fish announced the creator fund on stage. And, uh, our comms director was like, Jake, hold on. And I was like, I double dog dare you. I triple dog dare you do it. And, uh, and fish, fish, I saw him stand up. He went over, he kneeled next to Nicole, our development director to, to get it cleared or deputy director. And then he went up on stage and said challenge accepted all the donations from this dinner will start it and that actually kicked off a major donation from an anonymous donor uh the in the.

[11:58] Helps pay for it for the first year. So we’re really excited. I mean, that’s what, that’s what gets me about the religious right and the Christian nationalists, man, is they can just cut a check and fund this stuff. And it’s like, it’s like trying to get blood out of a turnip sometimes on our side. Yeah. You know, there’s, there’s this idea that secular people don’t donate. And I, I think that’s horse hockey. We do donate. Like I donate to my local museum. I donate to a lot of local stuff. I donate to politicians I agree with. I think donations about having something that excites you. And a lot of times, to your point, humanism hasn’t been super exciting. Like looking at my own life, I didn’t engage with it for 16 years. And part of what made me come to this organization was saying, oh, I have an opportunity to make this exciting. I have an opportunity to make humanism something that 30-year-old me really would have wanted to be a part of, that 35-year-old me would have shown up for, right?

[13:01] And so what does that look like? And then once we figure out what that question is, things like this creator fund, the donors do show up because they’re excited about it. And they’re more excited about it than they are donating to their local museum or to some other secular project. And so I think donations are not just donating for the sake of status quo, right? But what are those big, hairy, audacious goals that we’re trying to achieve. And so I think a lot about what does the humanist world look like in 2050? What does the humanist America look like in 2100?

[13:36] You know, I love Roddenberry Star Trek, obviously. And I think a lot of us are Star Trek nerds in the humanist space, but like, how do we create that federation? That’s a humanist ideal. And those are big ideas, but to do that, we have to do, we have to take big swings. And so I think the Creator Fund is one of those big swings that were taken.

[13:56] And as you mentioned, you, uh, started in March, so you’ve been with the organization for a few months now. Uh, what so far is the best part that you found of your, the job that you’re doing? Yeah. What, what, uh, excites you the most? I think it’s talking with, with people. I met with a new, new to me person this morning in Nashville, Tennessee. Um, and they’ve just been working the walking the good walk for, for years, right? Uh, they’ve been putting in the effort, people like you who are just showing up week on week and saying, Hey, here’s what I believe I do this because this is what needs to be done. Um, I think that gives me a lot of hope and a lot of excitement. We have communities like that all across the country, uh, from Los Angeles to, to New York, um, you know, from Seattle to Florida, we have people showing up week on week because it’s what needs to be done. And it’s, it’s what needs to happen to create that world that we’re talking about, of a more ethically sound, rational, compassionate space.

[15:01] And it starts on the ground. And so I think the best part for me is talking to people. And if I could, I’d spend eight hours a day just connecting with local people every day.

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[15:20] For more information about the topics in this episode including links used please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

[15:30] Music.

[15:41] And how does working at the AHA differ from your past experience with the YMCA and with the play school? Yeah. So, you know, I worked at one YMCA in downtown Austin, the flagship for the Austin Association. And we had 2,000 unique visitors a day come through the door.

[16:03] And so when you work at a swimming gym, it’s really easy to get people to show up for what you believe in. Which, you know, the Y’s mission is kind of to build a community and to make sure that, you know, healthy bodies, healthy minds, healthy spirits. But when you have something that’s beside the mission that people, people just need a gym. They don’t care if it’s the Y or if it’s lifetime fitness or something else. They’re just going to show up. With humanism, getting people to show up is a little bit more of a challenge, because humanism shows up differently for almost all of us. Some people want the lecture-style educational component. Some people want just service projects. Some people want, you know, a community social gathering, like a stitching circle or a book club.

[16:52] But none of those things are relevant to everybody. And so finding enough volunteers and finding enough space for those types of things, those are all really unique challenges that we didn’t have to deal with at the Y. And then from play works at play works i got to play four square and wall ball and tag every day for a living i was a recess consultant right and uh in the humanism space we we tend to trend a little elderly and so me showing up sometimes with my hey let’s play a game together is uh you know i think i think everybody’s been up for it so far which i i really appreciate but it’s also different than let’s have an intellectual conversation but i think both of those things are distinctly humanist and show the the breadth of challenge that we have and defining what a humanist community looks like is it an intellectual discussion or is it a playful social gathering.

[17:47] Yeah i just want to kind of ape on to what you were saying uh earlier and and we experienced that when we were doing the organizing call yesterday, um, that, you know, you have to offer a variety of different programming to your membership or to the people that you want to come out. Because, you know, like you said, not everybody wants to have a lecture. Not everybody wants to walk in the park and not everybody wants to go to the zoo. And you, you mentioned that before, I think before we started recording about family day at the zoo, I organized one when I was down in Columbus one time because Columbus, Ohio has a decent, really great zoo. And it was me and like one other person that showed up.

[18:34] And this person was like, Doug, why did you even bother? I was like, you know, if one person shows up, I’m good. And that’s how I always go about when I program is even if one person shows up, that’s successful because it does. It takes a while to build that up. I’ve been telling people, what are you going to do anyway? Like what what do you want to do already right don’t don’t try to force anything just say you know what i want to do this thing already i just want to do it with people that aren’t going to judge me for my for my non-beliefs right uh i want to i want to do these things with people who have the same values as me people that i can commiserate with about the state of of the of the world and that i can plan with on how to fix it and make it better so for me those things are walking in the park, um, maybe sailing. If I could find people to go sailing with, I live on Lake Michigan, I love sailing, um, bike rides and cycle rides, or even just board game nights, right? Uh, those, those are, those are things. And so I have that community here that I’m building in Milwaukee of like valued, like-minded people. Do all of them call themselves humanists? No, they don’t. Um, mostly because they don’t know what it is. Are they humanists? Yeah, they are. Are they starting to learn what it is through me? A hundred percent. But I think we don’t always have to be so…

[19:55] Hey, you have to be this thing before we can do this thing together. I think that something that, you know, thinking back on my church days, Vacation Bible School, I think, is a kind of a good example of how churches do this, right? They market it as like summer daycare, and then the kids get indoctrinated. And by no means are we trying to indoctrinate people to our non-belief, right? Believe in non-belief. but I think thinking about how we show up in our spaces and what we’re offering is a really great way to challenge ourselves to think differently about how we’re building community and then challenging ourselves about where we’re marketing these things as well right so we’ve seen a lot of groups recently that have had a lot of success on marketing in their subreddits so if you’re familiar with reddit there’s almost a subreddit for every city in the country and so for example a guy in North Carolina, Marcus, he’s the state director for American Atheist, but he’s also very involved with AHA.

[20:52] Marcus has been helping start local small town groups like in Boone, North Carolina and Hickory, North Carolina. And he’s doing that by using a tool that we’re rolling out called Action Network, which is free to local groups to use. It’s kind of a CRM sort of email database. He’s creating a form in there that says, you know, some basic information. And then he’s going on the Boone, North Carolina subreddit and saying, Hey, are you looking for secular friends, atheist, humanist, agnostic friends. There are people in your community that are looking to hang out with you. Fill out this form to find out more. And he’s built a list of 20 or 30 people in each of those cities by just doing that one post on Reddit. And so in my tech job, I worked in partnerships. And the question I asked myself every day was, who already has my customers? And so the question I keep asking myself in this role is, who already has our humanists? Where are humanists already hanging out that we can go show up in those spaces? And I think there’s a ton of them on Reddit. Reddit tends to trend more liberal than a lot of other websites, website communities. I think that there’s a lot of those people showing up at the national mobilizations that are happening. And I think if we show up at those spaces with tables or if we show up as event hosts for those mobilizations, it gives us an opportunity to talk about what humanism is and invite them to be a part of our community. Uh, and so, yeah.

[22:16] It’s worth it if one person shows up and then challenging ourselves to think about where we’re marketing and how we’re and the events that we’re showing

[22:24] up to, to, uh, to connect with humanists who might not know they’re humanists. Well, you already talked about some of this, uh, but, uh, what kind of plans or ideas do you have to bring in younger people into humanist groups since we do skew older? It’s a great question. So we just recently launched an LGBTQ Young Humanist grant program that’s targeted at humanists between the ages of 18 and 30 to do a service project or community event in partnership with a local LGBTQ organization. We know that there’s a ton of humanists in the LGBTQ space who, again, probably just don’t know that they’re humanists or haven’t identified as humanists because it hasn’t been presented. So we think that’s a huge opportunity area for us to support them and building community and say, hey, we’re here for you if you want to be a part of what we’re doing. If you believe in the future that we think is possible by being good and kind and ethical and reasonable. So that’s one example of where we’re working. where we had an internship this program or an internship program this summer where we had four interns work with us on a variety of projects.

[23:40] The LGBTQ Young Humanist Program was built by the organizing intern by Kate. She did a great job building out that program. And we’re gonna continue to do that internship program. We’re looking at doing year round type of internships or fellowships for younger folks because if programs are being built by younger people, then they’re attractive to younger people.

[24:01] On top of that, we’re working with these YouTube secular creators whose audiences tend to trend between the ages of 18 and 35 to just really kind of do a brand awareness on humanism, which is a weird thing to say about a belief system. But humanism does have a marketing problem. Like we have a brand awareness problem if we’re looking at it from that kind of business marketing perspective.

[24:23] Fish likes to say that we think there’s 44 million humanists in America who just don’t know they’re humanists. Um, these are good people living ethical value, rational driven lives, uh, maybe without the framework to, to help them continue to grow in that space. So we’re, we’re rolling out a podcast that fishes is kind of testing out right now as well. We’re rolling out, um, the secular creator sponsorship fund. We’re rolling out grant programs specific to this, uh, in the new year, we’re going to roll out this really cool empathy grant project, which is, um, we’re really excited about. That’s a six-figure grant project that we’re going to roll out in the new year to really help infuse new communities to get started and help jumpstart some of this stuff. We’re going to pilot us leaning in in a couple of cities to start younger groups and say, what does this look like? What kind of social events work to bring out younger humanists and help them find us? We’re going to be doing a lot of testing of marketing in this space as well, both at the local level and the national level, and say what works here, right? This is a time of mass mobilization across the country. We’re all terrified. We’re all frustrated. We’re all feeling one way or another about everything that’s happening, and we need a community of people who believe the same things around us more today than maybe ever in my life, at least.

[25:51] And I think we all feel a sense of loneliness and despair that can really be.

[25:57] Tempered by spending time with people who have a hope that humanity can be better than this and will be better than this, uh, and then working together to make that happen. So we’re going to do everything we can to support creation of young humanist groups and to help existing groups think differently about events and projects that they can run to recruit younger ages. Yeah. I hope that that works out. I really do because yeah, I, you know, I went to the 2001, uh, AHA conference in Los Angeles. And I think I was the only person that was under 45 at the time. Yeah. So it’s tough. Um, I know, uh, we had some young people that we knew, uh, uh, my co-founder, uh, had a, has a daughter and a son that are younger. And so they asked them, you know, what, what’s up, you know, why, why aren’t you coming to meetings and things like that? And a lot of what they said was that, that younger people tend to join ad hoc groups, like for a particular, for a particular thing or a particular topic and not like traditional large groups. They don’t normally join traditional large groups. I hope that that gets better. You know, maybe there’s just some key that we’re not seeing yet that will trigger that. I think there’s something to be explored there. Like, I show up.

[27:25] I think about this local organization that’s here in Milwaukee called the Milwaukee River Keepers, of which I donate to, and I’m a proud, proud donation of that. I’m very proud of the Milwaukee River system.

[27:37] I like clean water. I think we can all agree that we like clean water.

[27:41] But they run a twice-a-year cleanup project where 1,500, 2,000 people will come out and do that. Um and of the years that we’ve been here i’ve participated a handful of times but it is kind of in that ad hoc experience of you know i i don’t show up to all of their events i’m loosely connected i’m a proud supporter of it um but i don’t show up to everything and i think that’s probably true for a lot of people my age and younger and so i think figuring out what what those rotational projects and events are that that get people excited we have an event organizer in los angeles named evan clark uh and evan does a um uh when he speaks he talks about building excitement layering levels of excitement and so you you you build an eye at event idea and you say you know we’re going to do this uh movie in the park and they say okay that’s all right but But how do we make it more exciting? Well, we gotta, we gotta have food there. All right, well, how do we make it more exciting? Well, we gotta have bouncy houses or we gotta have a capture the flag game or we gotta have, you know. And so when you stack layers of excitement, you start to create some FOMO of I have to be there. I don’t wanna miss this thing. And I think a lot of our existing events have been the same events for a really long time. And that’s okay for the people who enjoy that space. But for younger folks.

[29:09] They need variety. They need excitement. We were, you know, I’m 41, but people younger than me and even me to some extent were raised on 30 second videos. You know, vine was a big deal 10 years ago, 10, 15 years ago. Vine was, I think only 15 second clips or something. And it went crazy. And so people’s attention spans are shorter. People are looking for dopamine in new ways and to, to get something we’ve never had, we have to do things we’ve never done, which means that we can’t just be stagnant with our, with our ideas. We have to constantly be innovating and thinking about how do I make this cooler? How do I make this more exciting? Um, and so I think there’s something to be said about ad hoc as well. And that might just mean that, you know, you have people who only show up to your service projects.

[29:52] That’s okay. Right. Um, as long as they’re part of your community and part of the greater community, we have a couple of communities around the country that kind of have smaller affinity groups and they only bring their big community together like once a year for like a family picnic quote unquote or a community picnic i think there’s a a lot of merit in that model of what does membership look like in our local group or what does joining look like younger generations kind of they kind of shy away from both of those words they don’t want to join something they don’t want to be a member of something but they do want to participate and they do want to support an event or help they they they show up for service, they show up for advocacy, and they show up to play games and they show up to build community. And so some of our language might need to shift a little bit as we look towards the future as well.

[30:43] Now, I am not one to really be concerned about numbers, but some people like to know about how many members does the AHA have and how many active chapters do you think that there are? Yeah, great question. So we say we have between 30 and 32,000 members and supporters. And that number is on the uptrend. Donations are way up over last year. I think, to your point, there’s a lot of exciting things happening and we’re doing a lot of stuff. And our current member base is pretty excited about the direction that we’re going and as new people find us uh they seem to be pretty excited about it as well so 30 to 32 000 members and supporters our email list and our contact list is much bigger than that thankfully and we’re seeing like a 300 increase on engagement on social media in the last couple of months which are huge numbers as well. We have a really active and growing engaged audience on Blue Sky, which is really exciting to see. And another great place that groups should be showing up if they’re not showing up already.

[31:49] And then from local groups, so we are just currently in the middle of a census. So we’ve been saying we have 230 plus local communities, but we haven’t censused or audited that number in a really long time. So as of right now, we’re about, we’ve been running the audit for about two months. As of right now, we have 100 plus local communities that have responded to that and verified that they’re still going. I know that on the unverified list, I know at least 50 of the people that are still on that list are in existence because I’ve talked to them. They just haven’t filled out the census yet. So I would say we have somewhere around 150 to 200 local communities right now. And that’s just ones that are affiliated with us. I keep finding humanist groups that aren’t affiliated with us, but are in existence. So, uh, just in the last week, we added nine new groups. Eight of those are Sunday assemblies. So Sunday assembly, Nashville, Sunday assembly, Pittsburgh, Sunday assembly, Fort Worth. Um, I can’t remember all the rest of them off. Seattle is another one. These are communities that are 100, maybe not 100% humanist,

[32:51] but they are very humanist in how they show up. There are a lot of humanists in those spaces. And I will, with 100% confidence, tell a humanist to go join a Sunday Assembly group in their community. The same is true of the Oasis Network, which Houston Oasis just became a member last month. And so we’re looking for these kinds of humanist communities that already exist as well and saying, hey, friends, let’s help each other out and let’s affiliate.

[33:17] And so our network is growing quite rapidly. I think we’ve added something like

[33:21] 25 new groups in the last six months. You recently attended, I’m assuming it was your first AHA conference recently? Yeah, yeah, it sure was. So how exciting was it? And besides the creator fund, what other news came out of that? Yeah, yeah, it was really exciting. One, it was in Chicago, which I’m from South Chicago. so it was a nice homecoming for me. I took the train down from Milwaukee, which anytime I get to take the Amtrak is a luxury and a joy, so I really enjoyed that. The very first day we were there, we had a half-day organizer workshop where about 35 local organizers from around the country showed up and spent four hours in community and learning together, and we got to learn how to be radically welcoming from Audrey Kingstrom and HumanismN. We got to learn about herding cats and stacking excitement from Evan Clark. We got to learn about Community Days, which is an idea that the Chicago, one of the Chicago communities is doing. Um, we got to learn from, uh, Americans United for separation of church and state, how they run their youth fellowship program. And that’s really important to not ask what can the youth do for us, but what can we do for them is a big takeaway from that session.

[34:40] And, and then I led a session on play. So those 35 people got to start the day with a playful games with me. Um, which again, when we play together, it not only builds empathy, but it also puts us in a state of ready learning. I think it’s really important that as adults, we’ve been conditioned to think that play is for children. And I think as humanists, we should believe the science that all mammals play and it is crucial to being a mammal and therefore we should infuse more play into our days and into our communities. So that was day one. I loved every part of that. From there, we went into our regular conference, and I was thrilled to meet everybody from around the country. I will happily report that this conference had a lot of people under the age of 45. Um there was a very diverse audience as well um it was not just one size and shape and color.

[35:33] Um which was great to see we had a lot of excitement a lot of energy um some of the best opportunities were not only from the sessions and getting to hear from people with these big ideas we did this big idea series where everybody got to vote on what kind of big idea they thought and the one that won was about um how humanists can show up for democracy which is going to be the the, the title cover page article of the humanist magazine that should be showing up in your inbox in the next couple of, uh, next couple of weeks, uh, in your mailbox rather. Um, but it was also the moments in between sessions or the evening where like we went to a jazz club with a group of people and we just really got to connect and build these relationships with, there’s just something so powerful about having a shared, a shared belief system and a shared, you know, it It felt a lot like I used to feel back in high school when I was surrounded by people who, you know, believe the same things that I believed. And that’s a feeling that I haven’t had in decades. So if you can go to a local humanist community or a local humanist conference, I highly, highly recommend it.

[36:37] Yeah, I always enjoy, you know, I haven’t been to a big conference. I, uh, last one I ever went to was Skepticon in St. Louis and it’s the same feeling. It’s like you’re in a room or, or small groups, you meet in small groups with a lot of people with different, uh, viewpoints and different, uh, different, uh, journeys and you learn all about them and, and it just kind of makes you go, Hey, you know, I’m, I’m doing the right thing i guess yeah you know yeah i agree with all that i 100 agree with that i had the opportunity this summer to go to the american atheist conference in minneapolis which was amazing it was a really great conference put on by the american atheist team um and then our conference in chicago and then just a couple of weeks ago i got to go to the secular student, conference in cincinnati which was another amazing conference uh and really exciting to see young people showing up for that in a big way. And they are angry and they are passionate and they are excited about what they believe and fighting for those beliefs, um, both locally and nationally. So I, yeah, very invigorating all three of those experiences and really exciting to see. Yeah. If you were in Cincinnati, you should have came by and saw me in Toledo. What? On the way to Chicago. Oh, you probably flew, didn’t you? I did. I flew in. Yeah, I flew in. I didn’t leave the, it was there at the university campus. I didn’t leave the campus the whole time I was there.

[38:07] But that was a really great conference as well.

[38:11] Sasha Sagan was one of the speakers there and Forrest, I don’t remember his name, but Forrest, a science YouTuber, did a fantastic presentation. Yeah, really great conference. But it was more about seeing the students so fired up and so excited and, uh, and so passionate about what they believe. All right. So if, uh, somebody is listening to this podcast right now and they’re enthusiastic and they want to be a member of the AHA, um, how would they go about doing that? Yeah, they can go to, uh, American humanist.org. That’s American humanist. Dot org, no S in there, uh, and check out our website. Um, you can email me, you can just email jake at humanist.org. And that’ll get to me, uh, jake at humanist.org. Uh, you can follow us on blue sky on Facebook, on Instagram, on X, on, uh, all the social medias. We, um, we have a vibrant, uh, social media presence.

[39:13] If you hit up our website, we also have what’s called dose of Humanism, where you get a text message every day from a humanist. I don’t know how many people realize this, but there are so many famous people that were humanists, from Margaret Atwood to Albert Einstein, and a ton of people in between. Some of my favorite authors are humanists, like Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut. And so there’s a wealth of quotes that Dose of Humanist dives into on a daily basis. That is totally free. We would also love for you to join our online community. So if you’re not close enough to join Doug and his community, or if you don’t have a community, please join our online discord community. You can join for as little as $1 online to get access to that. And that’s pretty vibrant and a growing online space. There’s 1500 hundred people in there now, Doug. So it’s, it’s a pretty busy every day. We’ve got a question of the day every day, which facilitates a really great conversation. Um, but just find a place to plug in whether it’s with us online digitally, or whether it’s a local community to you, even if it’s a little bit of a drive and you can only go once a month, um, find a way to, spend time with people who have the same values and, and world, uh, and want to see the same world that you do it it really can help you get through the craziness that we’re all feeling right now.

[40:42] All right, Jake, I really appreciate you spending time with us today. And sounds like things are really jumping at AHA headquarters in D.C. And really appreciate the time. Yeah, things are popping. It’s a great time to get plugged in at the national level. To your starting point, humanism can be a little bit sleepy sometimes. But, you know, from the civil rights movement to the founder of Planned Parenthood, we show up when the going gets tough. And the going’s a little tough right now. And we got to show up and we got to show up big and we got to, you know, spend time fighting back and saying, hey, no, this this is not how we treat each other. This is not the world that we were promised. As Fish likes to say, we’re the heroes we’ve been waiting for. And to do that, we got to show up together. So get plugged into a local community, support humanist creators, support national secular organizations. And and let’s do this thing. Let’s let’s flip it. Thank you for listening.

[41:39] Music.

[41:45] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

[41:55] Music. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger, and he’s solely responsible for the content.

[42:00] SHoWLE can be reached at humanistswle.org. Music,

[42:18] Music.