Report to Members for the years 1999-2000 |
This first report to members covers the period from March 21 1999, when we opened for memberships, to December 31, 2000. Looking back, the World Pantheist Movement's growth in breadth and depth has been remarkable since that first private mailing list of 33 people back in Spring 1997. |
Activities
Directors & Officers
Accounts for the year 2000
Activities |
| Membership: The World Pantheist Movement opened for subscriptions at the Spring solstice, March 21 1999. By December 2000 we had 210 subscribing members, in the USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and South Africa. At December 21, 2000, our three major mailing lists, Ideas, Community and Spirit, had 982, 949 and 246 members respectively, from 56 countries. These are the three largest Pantheist mailing lists on the Web. |
| Web communities: Our natural/scientific pantheism mailing list at AOL has been active since September 1997, and the generic pantheist list at Spiritweb since August 1997. By Fall 2000 the AOL list was suffering major constraints because of the difficulty of combining free debate about ideas with a spirit of friendship and development of community. To alleviate this we renamed the AOL list Ideas and created a new Community List for more unitive and developmental posts. Besides the main list there has been a gradual expansion of specialized lists, eg on vegetarianism, children, celebrants, local groups, and politics, and an announcement-only News list for important news about the WPM and its services. In October 1999 we created our topic-arranged bulletin board at Ezboard. |
| Local groups: Having started on the Web, with members scattered over 56 countries and all US states, our physical density is still low. Because of this, creating a presence at local level has proved challenging and depends on local initiative. Our geo database was used by many members to find pantheists near them. By December 2000 we had 35 local contact persons in many US states and parts of the UK, and 12 regional mailing lists. Many successful local gatherings were held, with an international gathering in Rome in February 2000 to mark the 400th anniversary of the martyrdom of Giordano Bruno. The most active group, in Southern California, became the first official branch of the WPM with its own constitution in December 2000. |
| Membership Advisory Council: Early in 2000 the Board of Directors passed the bylaws relating to democratic representation of members' interests. Elections were held in May and the MAC began functioning in June 2000. The MAC's role is to advise the directors on members' interests and World Pantheist Movement services, to consult on poll questions, and to deal with members' complaints of these are not resolved to the members' satisfaction. |
| Other facilities: There has been a gradual growth in the number of facilities provided for members and sympathizers. We acquired our own domain, www.pantheism.net, in 1998 and began loading pages there in 1999, offering World Pantheist Movement members free email forwarding addresses. Chat has been available throughout, though not much used due to our global scattering over many time zones. In August 2000 Ray Lee started up our Image Galleries which now have albums for member portraits, photos of local meets, photography and pantheist art. These have proved extremely popular with well over 10,000 visits. |
| Publications & information: The WPM quarterly Pan began publishing in November 1999, with the aim of collecting the best of member writing on various pantheist themes, reporting news of the WPM, and ideas for social action. Initial distribution difficulties with issues one and two (printed free of charge by David Wright) led to our using a commercial firm for printing and distribution. We acquired a toll-free voicemail number (877-479-4257) for telephone enquiries in the USA. |
| Promotion: The web sites continued to attract large numbers of visits. By November 2000 the natural/scientific pantheism site was getting 40,000 page views per month, and the World Pantheist Movement site pages about 7,500 a month (this is not counting all the mailing list archives, galleries and Ezboard). In 2000 we began to advertise in printed publications, starting with four half-page ads in The Humanist magazine, and booking a third of a page in the Unitarian Universalist World for January 2001. |
| Social action: The list for environmental action alerts was opened in October 1999 by Andrew Millard and by the end of 2000 had 53 members and had sent out 183 alerts. A donation page of multiple click sites for various social and environmental charities proved our single most popular Web page, with many people making it their home page. We signed up as a messenger organization for UNESCO's Manifesto for Peace and Non-Violence and collected 118 signatures from 18 countries, which was more than any other national-level USA organization. |
| Fundraising: Memberships were our major source of income. Our main source of additional funding in 1999-2000 was the Zeal web directory, which paid volunteers' favourite charities for every web site entered. By December 2000 our supporters had collected $3,080 for the WPM. After a rapid climb, we came consistently in the top six out of 660 charities at Zeal and for a brief spell we were number one. In December we added a facility to donate on the Web via Helping.org. |
| Challenges for 2001: Continuing to encourage local groups will be our major focus. We now have mapping software which should make it easier to find nearby members on request (contact StevenMCox@earthlink.net). On the basis of the Southern California experience, we will create a model constitution for local branches, to make formation easier. To help people holding their first meetings we hope to develop slide shows, model presentations, and suggested formats and activities for local groups. We hope to produce better literature on a wider range of topics to send out to enquirers and stock at our meetings and stalls. We also aim to tool up to allow members to order World Pantheist Movement T-shirts, mugs, lapel pins, mouse mats and other products. We will continue and hopefully complete defining the qualifications, training and mechanisms for pantheist celebrants able to help design and perform wedding and funeral ceremonies, with the aim of licensing celebrants from January 2002 or earlier. On the promotion front we will place informative display ads in selected science and environment magazines and regular small classified ads in a wider number of publications, and we will work to improve our prominence in Web search engines. We will also provide assistance to groups to advertize locally. We hope to approach prominent personalities for endorsement, and to begin fundraising by approaching potential donors. We will remain responsive to members' interests and needs, which we hope people will express in the WPM egroup, or via the Membership Advisory Committee. |
Directors & Officers at December 31, 2000 |
| Paul Harrison (President) |
| Andrew Millard (Treasurer & VP Americas) |
| Tor Myrvang (VP Europe) |
| Sue Williams (VP Africa) |
| Hilary Caws-Elwitt (Secretary) |
| Cindy Harmon-Jones (Membership Secretary) |
| David Wright (Publications) |
| Beryl MacLachlan (Legal Officer) |
| Ray Lee (Image galleries) |
| Mike Dolph |
| Walt Mandell |
Membership Advisory Committee |
| Tony Kilner (Chair) |
| Kim Skyelander (vice-chair) |
| Ernest Hopkins |
| Bruce Merkle |
| Jean-Michel Simoneau |
| Antony van der Mude |
Accounts for the Year
2000, ending December 31, 2000
|
|
INITIAL BALANCE |
$4,179.85 |
INCOME |
|
| Membership dues | $6,313.46 |
| Other contributions | $2,039.83 |
TOTAL |
$8,353.29 |
EXPENDITURE |
|
| Newsletter production and distribution [Issues 1& 2 produced free of charge] |
$1,126.92 |
| Advertising expenditures | $840.00 |
| Domain name and site hosting | $168.00 |
| Corporate report to State of Colorado | $141.00 |
| Office supplies | $84.41 |
| Post office boxes | $47.00 |
| Banking fees | $4.00 |
TOTAL |
$2,411.33 |
ENDING BALANCE |
|
| Bank of America account | $9,508.92 |
| PayPal account | $612.89 |
TOTAL |
$10,121.81 |
PLANNED EXPENDITURES FOR 2001 |
|
| Advertising budget | $6,160.00 |
| Newsletter production and distribution | $2,500.00 |
| Domain name and site hosting | $203.00 |
| Office supplies | $100.00 |
| Post office boxes | $50.00 |
TOTAL |
$7,013.00 |
| Reserve | $2,000.00 |
| Currently available for other projects (Eg, publications) | $1,108.81 |
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Page posted 2000. Contact us: info@pantheism.net