On a recent Friday at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza in Pensacola, volunteers with the Humanists of West Florida are giving out free bagged meals alongside the Food Not Bombs free dinner. It’s a typical scene for the activist group.
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For the past 10 years, the Humanists of West Florida have been providing support to causes in the area from homelessness to access to books, and even hot button issues such as the separation of church and state.
Bettie Myers, the current vice president, and past president of the Humanists group, said the secular, philanthropic organization at their core believes “it is the responsibility of human beings to solve the problems that humans have caused.”
When it was founded in 2013, there were just eight members, all from different walks of life. The organization is the local chapter of the American Humanist Association which was established in the United States in 1945.
“No one had the same profession as any other, there were some who lived worldwide, and some who were born and bred in the Pensacola area,” said Myers.
Similar to the Christian Ten Commandments, the Humanists believe in Ten Commitments which include empathy, peace and social justice, and environmentalism.
The Humanists started with a simple goal: adopting a couple miles of local highways to clean up litter. The idea soon became “burdensome,” said Myers, acknowledging the average age of the group is around 50 or older.
“It didn’t last long,” she said.
The group then turned their efforts to food.
“We would have a food drive once a year and sometimes twice, depending on the corporate sponsors that we got to help us,” said Myers.
During these drives, the Humanists would give out up to of 5,000 pounds of food to poor families in Pensacola. This continued until 2020, when COVID hit. Myers said the group shifted focus to provide a smaller amount of food on a weekly basis which included tuna, protein bars, snacks, and a water bottle.
It might not seem like much, but those bags have had a real impact, especially for homeless individuals.
“I have had people tell me that it made the difference between them not having to forage through a restaurant dumpster and being able to eat something that they knew wasn’t going to poison them,” Myers said.
The goal of the food bags is to keep people fed during the weekends until food banks open. They’re made to be portable and nourishing.
“If you make it too heavy and they can't carry it, they don't want it,” said Myers. “If I hand you six cans of pork and beans, what good is that going to be if you have to carry five or six cans on your waist and you have no place to sleep? No. This little bag was made with thought in mind.”
In accordance with their commitment to education, the Humanists have also installed little free libraries around town. They work with Open Books to keep them stocked. As an organization, they aim to install three to four libraries a year with a focus on low-income neighborhoods.
“If we recognize that children are our future, we like to be sure that there's enough children's books in there,” said Myers. “In fact, one of the libraries we can hardly keep stocked with young adult books because they just go so fast.”
The Humanists are also activists and support other organizations and causes that align with their Ten Commitments. In 2016, the organization joined the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s efforts to remove the cross at Bayview Park saying that the cross was a breach of the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state. The cross was eventually ruled as constitutional based on a Supreme Court’s decision to allow a cruciform monument to remain on public property in Maryland.
As the new President of Humanists of West Florida, Roy Skinner is looking ahead to the next 10 years. The group is also looking to be more active in local politics.
A big priority is membership, said Skinner.
“We lost a lot of our membership and involvement over COVID,” he added. “If you come see us at our assemblies, the average age is closer to 60 or more. We have to work towards growing the organization and getting younger folks involved who have energy, great ideas, and care about the community.”
To appeal to younger generations, the group is working to get more involved with the University of West Florida and Pensacola State College. Anyone interested in joining can apply on the Humanists website.
“We have this great reservoir of knowledge and experience, but if we don’t pass that on to the next generation, it’s gone,” said Skinner.