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Laura Mappin

Our Taboo Museum

Difficult Discussions are My Prozac

Laura Mappin

April 28, 2013

Laura Mappin, a Humanist Community member, will share her online website Our Taboo Museum which transforms taboos through crowd sourced conversation, art and products. She’ll also discuss the experiences in her life that drove her to create this collaborative place of straight talk with gobs of humor.

Her museum’s purpose is similar to the Humanist Community although discussions might be more personal and may cover a narrower set of topics. (String theory is not on the list.)

She will discuss her taboo taxonomy around which she organizes the site. It includes 14 groups, namely, Body, Aging, Death, Skin Color, Sex, Sexual Identity, Reproduction, Rape, Bigotry, Social Norms, Mental Health, Parenting, Money, Shame.

An egalitarian probably since birth, she grew up a sensitive kid with an angry father, experiencing misplaced violence which she of course misunderstood and folded into her opinion of herself. Then she spent almost 20 years in hi-tech, being exposed to near fatal amounts of left brain behavior. Being fired or laid off (who knows what that was) at the same time as going through an amicable and mutually desired but still security-shattering divorce, she clinched her date with the abyss.

All of these events fueled her passion to create this museum to talk about what holds humans back from acting more fully in our own interests. At least, that’s the theory.

The museum and a way to contact the speaker can be found at http://ourtaboomuseum.com

Humanist Community Forum (2013-04-28): Our Taboo Museum Difficult Discussions are My Prozac (Laura Mappin) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

Fred Colgan

Stove Project – innovative cook stoves for people most in need

Fred Colgan

April 21, 2013

Fred Colgan is the co-founder and Executive Director of Institutional Stove Solutions (InStove) a Cottage Grove-based non-profit which manufactures innovative cook stoves for people most in need in refugee camps, schools, orphanages, hospitals and clinics in the developing world. Over 500 InStove stoves are now in service in 18 countries around the world, mostly in Africa. Each stove serves from 3-500 people per day.

The core technology was designed for fuel economy, ease of operation, safety, portability, and reduction of emissions, and is unparalleled in performance. Allied technologies have been developed to deliver alternative fuel briquettes, hospital-grade autoclaves for sterilization, and a soon-to-be-released drinking water purification system.

Fred has been the driving force in establishing InStove’s reputation around the world, and he has traveled extensively to create the partnerships needed to serve the world’s most vulnerable people. He has been in a dozen refugee camps and visited eleven countries in the last year and a half, and is just back from Nigeria where InStove has started its first production partnership.

You can view Fred’s informative slides here.

Fred retired from a career of homebuilding and returned to Oregon after a 20 year absence. He and his wife Lise (a Lewis and Clark graduate) own the property in Cottage Grove which is home to both InStove and Aprovecho Research Center.

Humanist Community Forum (2013-04-21): Stove Project – Innovative Cook Stoves for People Most in Need (Fred Colgan) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

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Fred Colgan
Executive Director
Institutional Stove Solutions
www.instove.org
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Martin Squibbs

Our Phenomenal Human Mind, Core Values, Common Sense, Agreed Truths, Shared Visions, and Getting Real

Martin Squibbs

April 14, 2013

The relatively new fields of cognitive science, neuroscience, memory investigation and more, are finally uncovering the nature and form of the human mind. The home of self, source of emotion, recorder of past, discoverer of knowledge, imaginer of future, master of Philosophy, conjurer of the super natural, and builder of civilization – the container, no less, of our entire personal world. As science uncovers this phenomenon of human consciousness, what practical benefits might these insights offer to humanity? Will they help us to better achieve social justice, to develop more effective economic systems, and to return, if possible, to a healthy and thriving material balance with the natural environmental? What are we coming to realize as human beings, and might it lead us to become a more civilized, joyful and healthier species on Planet Earth?

Click here to see the slides for this fascinating presentations.

Luis Granados

Damned Good Company: Twenty Rebels Who Bucked the God Experts

Luis Granados

April 7, 2013

The author will provide a program on his book Damned Good Company; a collection of Profiles in Courage for humanists – a book to make humanists proud of themselves.

Damned Good Company is a book about people, not about God. People who have preached about God, taken money for sharing what they say they know about God, and ordered others about to enforce what they claim to be God’s will–and a small band of heroes who stood up to them.

In short, Damned Good Company is a Profiles in Courage for humanists.

Some of the twenty heroes of Damned Good Company are well-known: Erasmus, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Clarence Darrow, Atatürk, Nehru, Stephen Bantu Biko. Others are not: people like Han Yü, banished from the 9th century Chinese court for questioning the worship of the Buddha’s finger, and Lucy Harris, who came within an inch of deflating Mormonism before it got off the ground.

Each hero is contrasted with a villain of his or her time and place: either a God expert like Martin Luther or Joseph Smith or a cynical politician like Mussolini, who never believed in God but exploited religion shamelessly to advance his political ambition.

The stories in Damned Good Company will inspire those today who want to stand up to the Christian Right, the Muslim fanatics, the oppressiveness of Catholic and Jewish orthodoxy, the rising Hindu Taliban, and everyone else who claims a God-given right to tell the rest of us what to do.

Damned Good Company is available from HumanistPress.com and all major online ebook retailers.

Humanist Community Forum (2013-04-07): Damned Good Company – Twenty Rebels Who Bucked the God Experts (Luis Granados) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

John Montgomery

Law as Hero:

How law will support the creation of a conscious and sustainable global economic system

John Montgomery

March 31, 2013

John has worked for many years to support the legal introduction of a new type of corporation, a B (or benefit) corporation, into state law throughout the US. A “B corporation” has the legal responsibility as a company to be of benefit to society and the environment, as well as to make a financial profit. John’s presentation focused on this work, and the nature of B Corporations, while also showing how this legal change is combining with 2 other key social developments, namely the cultural movement of Conscious Capitalism, and the scientific progress in neuroscience and human behavior, to facilitate a paradigm shift in the corporate world, enabling the development of more healthy, prosperous and responsible corporations, with better leadership, which embrace, promote and seek to realize social benefit and environmental sustainability along with also making a profit.

John provided a brief history of the corporation and the changes in their legal status since the 1700s, showing how their legal status has failed to adjust to their increasing importance and power within society, such that today they are literally almost solely responsible for shaping our human civilization, while legally being obliged only to make money.

John further argues that without the legal foundation of a B Corporation, while many corporations may start off with great leaders, ethical intentions and noble visions, when either leadership changes or internal crises occur, these corporations can quickly lose their good intentions, and regress to a money making survival mode. By writing socially beneficial values into a corporation’s legal foundation as a code of conduct with the status of law, he argues this regression is far less likely to ever occur.

For more information please see the following websites

www.greatfromthestart.com for free downloads from John’s Book, Great from the Start.
http://www.bcorporation.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
http://www.avaaz.org/en/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avaaz

John Montgomery is an entrepreneur, executive coach, corporate attorney and author of Great from the Start, a step-by-step guide to building a successful conscious corporation. John is the founder of Montgomery & Hansen, LLP a B Corp certified corporate law firm. He is also the founder of Startworks, a Silicon Valley based technology incubator that develops start-ups to thrive in an interdependent global economy. He works primarily with high-potential entrepreneurial teams to help them translate their visions into successful companies. He was also a co-chair of the legal working group behind California’s new benefit corporation legislation.

Humanist Community Forum (2013-03-31): How Law Will Support the Creation of a Conscious and Sustainable Global Economy from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.