LEICESTER SECULAR SOCIETY IN PLEA TO CELEBRITY ATHEISTS TO HELP RAISE £40,000

This article appears in today's Leicester Mercury:

Leicester Secular Society in plea to cleebrity atheists to help raise £40,000

by Peter Warzynski

Celebrity atheists are being asked to help pay for the renovation of a society's headquarters.

Members of Leicester Secular Society are writing to 40 well-known people, including Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais, in a bid to raise £40,000 for the project.

The society is also appealing to local secularists to support the scheme to improve the Victorian building in Humberstone Gate.

Work will involve installing an accessible toilet, new kitchen, hearing loop, second fire exit and internal renovation.

The total cost is about £65,000, but the organisation has £25,000 in its reserves which it will use.

Harry Perry, president of the branch, said: "There are certain pressing problems on the ground floor where we have our meetings.

"We've appealed to about 40 celebrity atheists but I don't want to rely solely on them – we'll need our members to help us, too.

"The last census also identified that 24 per cent of the city are non-religious, so we're reaching out to them for help as well."

He said a number of attempts to secure funding had been unsuccessful and the organisation needed the full amount by the end of July.

"We approached the Heritage Lottery Fund, but it said there wasn't enough of a heritage aspect," said Mr Perry.

"The Big Lottery Fund turned us down, too, because it's too much about the building and not enough about the community.

"In fact, 95 per cent of sources of funding require we are a charity or a religious organisation and we're neither."

Leicester Secular Society has about 150 members and has used the grade-II-listed building for 130 years.

It hosts a variety of events, including talks, lectures and meetings by a number of organisations.

Leicester City Council has offered to look at ways of supporting the society with some of the renovation work.

Mayor Sir Peter Soulsby said: "We'll help where we can with the project. In particular, we'd like it to include some work to the front of the building.

"The Secular Hall is a very important building in Leicester and unique one in the country.

"It has a proud history and is a place where people such as William Morris came to talk about not just secularism but society more generally."

Donate via their website at: www.leicestersecular society.org.uk

AMPLIFIED LEICESTER: MAKING IS CONNECTING

David Gauntlett

It's the last Wednesday of the month, so I'm at Phoenix Square Film & DigitalMedia Centre, for the regular meeting of Amplified Leicester. I've missed the last two meetings, so I'm glad to be back in the swing of things (especially as I'm convening the panel for the next session, at the end of March). This is the first of Amplified's evening session to be fully subscribed: 70 people have registered on Eventbrite.

The speaker is David Gauntlett, Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster (and a local Leicester lad). He's the author of several books, including Creative Explorations (2007), which was shortlisted for the Times Higher Young Academic Author of the Year Award, and Making is Connecting: The social meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 (2011). He produces the popular website about media and creativity in everyday life, theory.org.uk. There's also a great website dedicated to Making is Believing, which will reward repeated visits.

Through making things, people engage with the world and create connections with each other. Both online and offline, we see that people want to make their mark on the world, and to make connections. David Gauntlett discusses the rise of a "making-and-doing" culture, where people are rejecting traditional methods of teaching and learning and more passive forms of engaging with the world, such as television, and developing their own skills ans making their own entertainment.

David's talk is easy-going and professional in equal parts, displaying a level of presentation skills which show someone totally at home with the technology (maybe I'm thinking here about how I'll come over next time *gulp*). He made what, to some, may be an obvious point, but I still think worth making: that creativity didn't start with the world wide web, that the creativity we enjoy and value online is part of a continuum, both historically (he made nice extended references to John Ruskin and William Morris) and socially (regarding the kind of creativity that goes on under the radar and has often been identified with the activity of women).

This is all meat and drink to me, in keeping with the discussion of creativity in which I've been immersed while tutoring the Open University third-level (honours) linguistics course, The Art of English. I love it when the different threads in my life join up like this.

I get a moment at the the end to trail the panel I'm convening for next month's session, on Amplified Communities of Faith or Belief. I leave out copies of the Council of Faiths flyer with all our social media details on it and set a little homework - that those interested in coming to our session check out what we're doing with social media already and think of ways we could improve on it.

As we're leaving the session, Richard Hopper (Secretary of Leicester Secular Society, who'll be on the panel next month) tells me that William Morris gave his first public lecture in the Secular Hall on Humberstone Gate. Nice one.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JC!

An invitation this evening to the Late Lounge (under The Quarter Restaurant and Bar, Halford Street) to celebrate John Coster's birthday. Those connected with Leicester and Leicestershire will know John as the prime mover behind Citizens' Eye Community News Agency. Here's a bit from the website of Citizens' Eye, saying what they do:

The Citizens’ Eye Community News Agency website has been established to enable community people in Leicester and Leicestershire to become "Citizen Reporters" and provide a news gathering platform for current and relevant news to the third sector.

We aim to provide a professional media outlet for community groups to promote their events and share best practice amongst their peers.

We aim to present the stories and photographs received in a professional and unbiased way, and to accurately represent all communities.

In our portrayal of the people and locations reported, we shall strive to dispel much of the ignorance that erodes community cohesion.

As a gift, I buy John a copy of William Morris's Useful Work Versus Useless Toil. I think that's appropriate, since John's birthday (I don't know the precise date) is only a few days away from Workers' Memorial Day (28 Apr), which was observed in Town Hall Square and covered by Citizens' Eye.

Always nice to get so many of the positive, active and creative (and amusing) people in Leicester under one roof. I'm glad of the chance to have a sit-down with Gill Buttery, Development Worker with Leicester City of Sanctuary. It still amazes me, the number of people I've worked with over the past three years or so, but still barely know. Thanks for the time and the chat, Gill. Only sorry that I have to leave after just an hour or so and miss Steve Beverley's stint as DJ.