Update on Chase Giving and SSA Donation Drive – Thank You!

Back in July, I wrote about how the Secular Student Alliance’s website had been targeted by denial-of-service attacks. In that post, I called on Christians and other theists to donate to the SSA to help them recoup the costs they spent on erecting defenses, and to show solidarity against people who would silence others’ views through illegal means.

That campaign closed at the end of August, raising a total of $615. I’ve just donated that money to the SSA, and here’s a screen grab of the receipt for proof:

Thanks to everyone who contributed! The SSA, I’m sure, is grateful as well.

On a related note, the Chase Community Giving contest that all us atheist bloggers were promoting ended last night. I’m very happy to report that the Secular Student Alliance is one of the $50,000 winners, and Camp Quest and Foundation Beyond Belief won $20,000 each:

This is a grand total of $90,000 in free money for three organizations that are doing outstanding work to advance the secular community. My thanks to everyone who voted and who helped promote the contest – all of you are awesome! Give yourselves a well-deserved round of applause.

Still, I think we should set our sights even higher next time. Given the number of atheists we know are out there, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to vault our charities into the $250,000 or $100,000 categories. (Many of the biggest winners were animal-rescue groups: evidently, people can’t resist voting for cute animals. If the SSA changed its name to “The Atheist Kitten Alliance”, I bet we’d have broken records.) Let’s use this time to build on our success and to organize, and the next time this contest happens, let’s see if we can rake in some really impressive piles of cash for the atheist movement!

Image credit: bayasaa, released under CC BY 2.0 license