Looking to 2024
Publisher: In-Sight Publishing
Publisher Founding: September 1, 2014
Publisher Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada
Publication: Freethought Newswire
Original Link: https://www.bchumanist.ca/looking_to_2024
Publication Date: December 28, 2023
Organization: British Columbia Humanist Association
Organization Description: The British Columbia Humanist Association has been providing a community and voice for Humanists, atheists, agnostics, and the non-religious of Metro Vancouver and British Columbia since 1982. We support the growth of Humanist communities across BC, provide Humanist ceremonies, and campaign for progressive and secular values.
Looking to 2024
Where we saw our research turn into results in 2023, our goals are even more ambitious for 2024.
CHALLENGING RELIGIOUS PRIVILEGE
We ended the year with clear victories as we secured commitments from most of the remaining communities in BC that future inaugural council meetings would comply with the state’s duty of religious neutrality. However, we are still waiting to hear back from a few more municipalities.
That’s why our first priority in the new year will be escalating our pressure and determining what steps we can take to end unconstitutional prayers at city council meetings.
Building off that success, we will turn our attention to property tax exemptions. Specifically, we’re developing model policies that we will be asking cities to adopt to ensure those exemptions are reserved for organizations that deliver real public benefits.
We are also going to survey the policies of public school boards across the province. From this, we will be able to identify best practices to protect the secular nature of our schools, as well as to ensure every district has policies that promote the inclusion and diversity of the entire community.
We also have to keep up the pressure to end institutional objections to providing reproductive and end-of-life healthcare options to patients in publicly funded facilities.
And we need to stay responsive to church-state separation issues as they arise.
BUILDING THE HUMANIST COMMUNITY
More and more volunteers have been coming to us, eager to launch local groups and meetups in communities across this province.
We have been taking some initial steps to work with these individuals to help get some meetups off the ground and we’re hopeful that we can begin piloting some of these groups in early 2024.
As we develop this approach to grassroots community building, we plan to create materials and connections to help potential organizers step into the role of local humanist leaders without the barriers that have existed in the past.
TELLING HUMANIST STORIES
Finally, we know that BC is majority non-religious and most of those people share humanist values. But few openly identify with the term.
Our social media channels have grown in the past year and we’re at the stage where we can start to leverage those tools to talk more about what humanism is and who humanists are.
Humanism is a way of life for everyone and we need to get that message out, whether through TikTok videos, Instagram stories, Facebook memes or podcasts.
These projects and goals are ambitious for our small organization. We’ve been fortunate enough to be the beneficiaries of some incredible generosity in recent years that has helped us reach this point. But we also need to keep growing to achieve sustainability.
We have an ambitious year-end fundraising goal, and every contribution to that helps. This is your movement, help us grow it.
By Ian Bushfield
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