 Liz Liddell hates being called Lizzie because the thought of it makes her all dizzy. So the way she made sure no one would try makes the letter I in Liz with a Y. Freaking genius, right? Isn't that great? Ladies and gentlemen, Liz Liddell. I recognize that I'm not as large a name speaker as many of the speakers here at TAM. And so I figured I'd give you a little bit of background. And to do that, you need to understand the organization that I work for. And that's the Secular Student Alliance. So I guess I don't have a whole lot of explaining to do. The Secular Student Alliance is one of the only secular organizations in the United States that is solely dedicated to the support of secular students and student communities. We should promote the ideals of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism and human-based ethics. We are a recognized leader in grassroots organizing, cooperating with dozens of other organizations in the U.S. and beyond in the Freethought Movement and beyond, including of course the excellent James Randi Educational Foundation. So that's my organization. I'm the most visible person at the Secular Student Alliance. I'm more like the director of campus organizing behind the curtain. I'm not a media rock star. I'm not a famous blogger. I'm not our executive director. What I am is a campus organizer. Somehow I'm going to figure out how to get all my notes up here so I know what I'm doing. There we go. I have four years of full-time professional campus organizing experience. I have experience with hundreds of student groups and thousands of student leaders here in the United States and I'm a resource on secular students and grassroots organizing not only within the Freethought Movement but beyond it as well. Now you're not here to listen to my life story. I understand that. So let's get down to business. Imagine for a moment what our world looks like without critical thinking. It is admittedly a little bit of a scary place. Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy are medical authorities on childhood illnesses. Acupuncture and ear candles are given equal booking to physical therapy, medicine and surgery in our medical health care programs. U.S. legislators refuse to make public policy on climate change because God says it's going to be fine. Now you all understand that this is a pretty scary place. You're already here fighting back against these ideas, fighting for more science and rationalism. But how do we change it for everyone else? It might seem like an impossible task. We have to go to the very roots of our society, change both public policy and societal awareness. We need to build a new culture, one in which questioning is lauded and blind faith is not. We need to change the way people think and we need to start early. We're going to start with students, all of them. Why students? We have a tremendous opportunity in front of us right now. More than ever before, young people are beginning to question what they're being told, including even those topics that were once thought to be unquestionable, namely religion. Take a look at this graph. We're looking at that orange line more to the right-hand side. That's the millennial generation. That's the people who are in college right now. And all of those, over 30%, are doubting the existence of God. That is twice as many as any other generation and twice as many as their own generation just five years ago. And if they're questioning the previously untouchable question of God, then just imagine what else they're starting to question. They are already out there thinking about this stuff. So we have this great opportunity to give them the skills and tools they need to reach out, see what they're looking at, question it, evaluate it, and make the best possible conclusions about our world. Of course, there are some very pragmatically driven ideas why we should be working with students as well. The university setting is a great place for new ideas. Oftentimes, students are encouraged to come up with new ideas as part of projects and homework assignments, much less being presented with ideas from their peers that they may not have encountered before. Moreover, again, especially in the college setting, students are no longer as closely held under their parents' influence. They have the freedom to experiment and explore the world around them. Bonus, students have access to funding and space through their universities. This enables them to hold much larger events at much lower equivalent costs to many other audiences. But the most important reason we work with students is that students are the future. They are not going to be in school forever, at least most of them, but they're going to leave. They're going to graduate. They go on to become CEOs, politicians, doctors, and pop culture icons. The scientific and critical values they hold as students are going to remain with them throughout their lives. This is how we change society. As with any social movement, we do face some obstacles, and many are unique to this situation. Students don't have a lot of extra cash. In today's economy, which is great, and with rising tuition costs, oftentimes students are taking out tremendous loans just to pay for the costs of tuition, housing, and textbooks. They don't have a lot of spare pocket change. On top of that, they usually don't have reliable transportation, which makes it hard for them to get off campus and get to events like this here today. We like to say at the Secular Student Alliance that our work is like organizing at a bus stop. Everybody is coming and going very, very quickly. Leaders move on, and that makes it hard for a group to survive with multiple transitions, often every single year. And even if the group does survive, we have a loss of the institutional memory that makes a group strong. The new leaders have to relearn the same basic lessons every single year. Geographic isolation can be a problem. Colleges are often kind of in the middle of nowhere or in very small towns. If you're at a Secular Student Alliance in, say, Bozeman, Montana, there might not be another secular group for 100 miles. Student groups die. It happens, especially with that high turnover. The college level, we've historically seen about one in 10 groups die every year. At the high school level, it's about one in five. Some scientific ideas are facing a lot of resistance right now. Try going to Texas and teaching climate change as fact or evolution in Louisiana. How about comprehensive sex ed and reproductive rights in Oklahoma? Vaccinations in Los Angeles, so on and so forth. And this makes it hard for secular students to stand up and push for solid scientific education. On the other hand, we have some ideas out there that are pretty crazy that are making it hard to accept critical thinking. Ideas like, well, there can be multiple truths. Okay, that makes it really hard to take the one set of facts we have and have a rational discussion about it. But despite these obstacles, we have not let this get in our way. Secular students are a rising force in our society and they're beginning to be recognized all over the country. Take a look at how far they've come. This is 366 campus and high school groups right now. Yes, absolutely. The blue bars at the top of this graph represent our high school groups. We have 42 high school groups right now. I think Douglas Adams would be proud. And just in the past five years, we have seen really incredible growth in the number of secular students out there building communities to support the values of scientific and critical thinking. And it's not just the number of groups that's growing. The average group size has gone up in every way from dues paying members to attendance at events to Facebook groups and email lists. So we are reaching more students than ever before. At our national office, we've had to massively increase our staff to keep up with the demand we have. We have 14 staff and two interns right now. And as a result, we've been able to increase our affiliates' awareness of the services and resources we have to offer. And because of that, we've been able to take our longstanding goal of increasing retention to over 90%. This spring semester, we knocked that out of the park with over 92% attrition, retention. The demand for the services we offer is up. That means our groups are out there doing more. We've organized more speakers' bureau visits than we have before. We've sent out more resources for tabling so that students can go out on their campus, raise awareness and educate their communities. But here's the real kicker. We are sending out a phenomenal number of group starting packets. These free packets are available to any student interested in starting a group at their college or high school. And while not all of them become groups, the number of them that do is going up. In 2008, only about 14% of these packets resulted in successful affiliates. Today, this past school year, it's over 25%. So considering that we have over doubled the number of packets we're sending out and we've almost doubled the percentage of them that become groups, you can see why we're growing so fast. Now, here's a good question. What the heck are these student groups doing that's so important anyway? Well, let me tell you, they do a lot. Let's start with the easy ones. Our affiliate groups hold fantastic events with top-of-the-line speakers, bringing science and critical thinking to campuses and larger audiences all over the country. Phil Plate, Michael Sturmer, Massimo Piliuci, James Randy himself, and dozens more are making appearances at campuses with audiences of hundreds throughout the school year. And if that weren't enough, some groups are taking that to the next level and holding regional events and conferences of their own, anywhere from one to three days of fantastic speakers targeting a local or regional audience interested in skepticism. These events, like the Freethought Festival in Madison, Wisconsin, Skepticon in Springfield, Missouri, there we go, Reason Fest in Lawrence, Kansas, and many, many more events like these are entirely student-run and often free to attend, bringing in audiences of anywhere from a couple hundred people to over a thousand attendees interested in these issues. That's the strength that's in the student movement. Many of our groups participate in service projects. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society has challenged the secular community to participate in their cancer-fighting life-the-night walk, and secular students are rising to that challenge. Other creative groups have reached out and participated in week-long service projects, rebuilding houses in New Orleans, Florida, and other hurricane-damaged areas. This is a creative group knitting blankets for the Linus Project, which provides these hand-knit comforts to children who've suffered traumatic experiences. And these are just a few examples. Over half of all of our affiliates participate in service projects throughout the year. Our affiliates are passionate about social justice and human-based ethics. Here, the Rutherford High School campaign, the Rutherford High School Secular Student Alliance, mounts a chalking campaign to fight LGBT bullying. A Kansas student led the creation of the We Are Atheism website, which is the It Gets Better campaign for young atheists. We also see widespread participation in interfaith social justice programs, like the Interfaith Youth Corps Better Together program, and this past school year, one out of five groups of the SSA were participating in a program like this. Our students are enthusiastic about campus outreach and raising awareness of secular and free-thought issues. Many of our groups participate in the 1023 campaign, the Homieapathy Overdose event, with the clever slogan, there's nothing in it. The Alliance Secular Student Alliance on Good Friday held an event called Have a Good Friday Night, in which they handed out three condoms on campus. I'm gonna tell you more about that one. Not only does the event raise awareness of the Catholic Church's stance on AIDS in Africa and the misinformation they spread that contributes to the spread of AIDS, but it's also fun and promotes safe sex on campus while raising great attention for their group. In 2011, a student group created Ask an Atheist Day, which has become an annual national event all over the country. The off-campus community has picked up on this, and so they're beginning to participate in well, hoping to reach out, educate their communities, combat stereotypes, and correct misinformation. So where do we go from here? Let's start by taking a look at the programs that we're already working on. I keep talking a little bit about our high school groups, and that's a place where we can expect to see a lot of growth in the years to come. We launched our high school program in the beginning of 2011, and it has nearly quadrupled the size of our high school affiliate base in that time, and the demand at high schools is phenomenal. At our annual conference last weekend, we officially launched our regional program. We have two paid regional campus organizers, as well as an opportunity for volunteers to coordinate networks of SSA affiliate groups in a specific geographic area. These networks enable communication and cooperation so that groups can host collaborative events, speaker tours, and establish an understanding that their campus group is not the only secular group in the world, but that they are part of a larger free thought movement. The feed, at our conference, we had 14 of these networks start on this spot, and we're hearing more and more from interested students in creating even more networks through the country. Another program we just launched is a series of resources aimed at the faculty and staff advisors of our affiliate groups. We provide great training to our student leaders, and at our most recent conference, we also held a track of programming specifically for these advisors. The feedback from that track is going to become a series of web-based resources that all of our advisors will have access to, hopefully creating more advisor involvement in our groups, which will lead to more sustainable, strong, active campus affiliates. We also just launched our free student memberships. For years, the leaders of our affiliate groups have been part of a community that's larger than just their campus. With this program, we're expanding that opportunity for community and belonging to the entire membership of those groups as well as any students who don't have an SSA group in their area. We launched this program in March of this year, and we already have over 2,000 members. So if you're a student in this audience or you have students in your household, stop by our table outside in the hallway and become a member today. It's free and it's a great program. Our new alumni program went live this spring, which provides an opportunity for leaders and members of SSA affiliate groups to stay connected and involved with the movement after they leave campus. We have a special alumni membership rate, connections with other organizations, graduation gifts, an alumni newsletter, and more tools to keep those alumni involved and connected as they head out into the real world. And all of that, that's just what we have in the pipeline right now. Let's take a look further out and see where we might go. In five years, assuming the same rate of growth we've seen over the last year, we will have over 1,000 affiliate groups. Just think about that. Now, if you're a little skeptical saying, well, how can you assume linear growth and what do you know it's gonna happen in the future? I don't blame you for being skeptical, but here's where I'm coming from. There are almost 6,000 colleges here in the United States and over 24,000 public high schools alone. That's a lot of opportunity. And the general awareness of the Secular Student Alliance through traditional media and social media is skyrocketing. So we had the opportunity and we had the demand. Another way we can reality check this estimate is to take a look at an organization that we are pretty similar to in function. And that's the Gay Straight Alliance Network. We both work with an invisible, stigmatized population and we have a similar model of affiliate groups. The GSA network was formed in 1998. That's 14 years ago. And today they have over 4,000 GSAs registered at high schools and colleges across the country. Now take a look at this graph. That's 14 years right there. If our growth is gonna look anything like what the GSA network has seen, then this estimate of 1,000 groups in five years might be pretty damn conservative. So how do we do this? The students are out there. They have time, energy, passion, ideas, but they don't have the funding to support this movement by themselves. You're here, Tam. You are already committed to the secular, the scientific and critical thinking values that we all hold. And the Secular Student Alliance acts as a bridge between these two communities. We're a democratic membership organization and we rely on individual supporters and donations to make our work possible. And right now we have an incredible $250,000 matching offer on the table. So any donation you make today is gonna be matched dollar for dollar and we only have about $30,000 to go before we meet this match. We can't do what we do without support from individuals like you. So I'd love to invite you to come out after the talk, stop by our table, make a donation, become a supporter or find out other ways you can support secular students. Because together we can create that future that relies on critical thinking. Now I'd like to leave you with one last comparison. We are not infrequently referred to as the godless version of Campus Crusade for Christ, which has these days rebranded itself as Crue. And again, we have a similar campus organizing model, one national office, campus-based groups, but let's take a look at some of the differences in what we're doing out there. Crue teaches its members to follow doctrine and dogma. We teach members to question and inquire and learn about the world around them. Crue teaches that people are inherently sinful. While the Secular Student Alliance believes that people have an inherent value to them. Crue preaches the afterlife and we think this is our only life and we damn well better make the most of it. Crue encourages abstinence and represses sexuality in their members. The SSA encourages safe sex, positive sexuality and comprehensive sex ed. Crue's literature teaches that homosexuality is unnatural, unhealthy and sinful to be repressed at all costs and that transgender issues are so evil as to be unspeakable. While the Secular Student Alliance just changed our non-discrimination policy to include gender identity and gender expression to the already protected areas of sex and sexual orientation. Crue downplays climate change while the Secular Student Alliance encourages activism regarding climate change and other controversial issues. And Crue of course supports intelligent design while we're out there fighting for the teaching and understanding of fact based Darwinian evolution. So let's take a look at how we're doing out in the field. Let's start with budgets. Crue's annual budget is $500 million every year. This is our biggest budget year yet. We're on 998,000. Crue has three staff for every campus group they support. At the Secular Student Alliance each one of our staffers supports about 33 campuses. They clearly have the advantage in spreading their message but here's where it gets interesting. The latest data we have for Crue is from 2011. Between the years of 2007 and 2011 their campus program grew about 16%. But in the same timeframe 2007 to 2011 the Secular Student Alliance out there teaching secular values, skeptical inquiry, critical thinking, rationality and activism has grown by 116%. Adds up to 2011. Today we're at 366, that's another 93% on top of this chart. These are the secular students. They are the future and they are unstoppable. Thank you. Liz Liddell, Liz Liddell everybody.