This speaker participated in our 2014 Conference. Learn more about our 2023 conference speakers here.
The Secular Student Alliance has been helping secular students organize at high schools and colleges for over a decade. Now a new phase of this work is beginning: administrators are seeking the organization out. So in 2013 the SSA launched its Secular Safe Zone program which allows educators and administrators to take a short course to become a Secular Safe Zone ally: someone who can support a secular student struggling to understand her or his identity as a secular individual. People from nineteen educational institutions have now been trained to train others as allies at their schools.
August E. Brunsman IVBrunsman has been executive director of the Secular Student Alliance since 2001. In 1997 he co-founded Students for Freethought at the Ohio State University where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 2001, majoring in psychology and minoring in mathematics and cognitive science. He served as the Secretary of the Humanist Community of Central Ohio from 2009 through 2013, has volunteered for Camp Quest since 1999, and served as secretary of the Secular Coalition for America from 2006 through 2012. Brunsman is a celebrant with the Humanist Society.
