Mission of the United Coalition of Reason

The mission of the United Coalition of Reason is to raise the visibility and sense of unity among local groups in the community of reason, to create a national dialogue on the role of nontheists in American society, and to improve the way that nontheists are perceived by average Americans.

With the recent nationwide explosion of local nontheistic groups—be they humanist, freethought, atheist, secular, Ethical Culture, secular Jewish or otherwise skeptical—a challenge emerged to our fast-growing movement. In cities across the United States, many of the local groups either didn’t know about each other or weren’t communicating. As a result, they couldn’t coordinate their efforts toward raising their visibility and stature in their communities. The lack of coordination also meant that the groups were missing opportunities to bring in new members and broaden their audience.

To address this issue, the United Coalition of Reason was incorporated in January 2009 to provide funding and expertise to help local groups cooperate toward the goal of raising their public profile. United CoR now provides these services in four ways:

1. It lays the groundwork for the local Coalition of Reason—an informal body—to act as a forum for group leaders and a clearinghouse for public information on local groups.
2. It offers free Web hosting and a design template for the local CoR website.
3. It provides free public relations and media training of local group leaders so they may improve the public profile and outreach of their individual groups and the local CoR.
4. It provides funding for a local publicity campaign aimed at bringing traffic to the local CoR website.

The publicity campaign is usually a billboard in a highly visible place in a city, metro area, or other definable media market. But United CoR will as readily fund an ad campaign on buses or commuter trains or even in newspapers. The determining factor is whatever is most likely to garner the greatest exposure and media attention for area groups.

The free public relations and media training is offered to the leaders or PR people in the local groups in the form of a four-hour seminar conducted by Fred Edwords, a longtime specialist in these areas and a public speaker well known to humanists, freethinkers, and religious liberals.

The primary focus of United CoR is local. As such, it doesn’t compete with other national organizations, and its local work is geared toward fostering the success of existing groups, not changing their nature or adding new groups or an additional organizational level to the mix. A central goal is to help unaffiliated nontheists learn about local activities and, ideally, get involved.

There is never any obligation, financial or otherwise, to United CoR from any local CoR or the groups within it. Once the media training has been provided and the advertising campaign has been launched, the rest is totally up to the groups involved as to what direction their CoR will take next.

United CoR is independently funded and therefore accepts no financial contributions. Donors wishing to support the United CoR effort nationally will be asked to contribute, instead, to appropriate organizations in their local area.