Membership Programs Launched

Student Pugwash USA is now two international networks of people promoting the Pugwash mission of ethical considerations in STEM and international security: Student Pugwash, for students high school and up, and the Rotblat Society, for everyone else. The Rotblat Society is an entirely new initiative, bringing together alumni and new members alike to provide resources for our programs, mentorship to our students, and a valuable network to each other. What's also new is that both are organized around individual members—we encourage people to form chapters and groups as they wish, but individual members can take part in our online communities, events, and programs.

What's thirdly new is our financial model: we're dependent on membership dues and donations to provide programs for our members and generally keep the lights on. If you're interested enough to be reading this far, we hope you'll be interested enough to join or donate. If your philanthropic giving schedule includes Giving Tuesday, we hope you'll include us.

Our Alliance Network Grows

Another new initiative here is our Alliance network, where we support other organizations whose programs and events support the Pugwash mission. By doing this, we leverage the work of other nonprofits and NGOs, and create opportunities for our members to get involved in a wider menu of programs.

First and foremost among our Alliances are our partnerships with other organizations in the Pugwash Movement, especially International Student/Young Pugwash. We are taking steps to share our organizational infrastructure widely with our sibling National Groups, to make them more effective and, again, increase networking between Pugwash members and participants worldwide.

A sampling of our Alliances to date:

• International Student/Young Pugwash: we are opening our infrastructure support and online community tools to any Student Pugwash group worldwide, giving capabilities to National Groups which do not have the resources to build these tools on their own. We have especially been working closely with the nascent Young Pugwash Italy, which has an exciting agenda of nonproliferation education.
  
  
• "Senior" Pugwash: The Pugwash Conference scheduled in Doha, Qatar was unfortunately delayed due to COVID-19 in February. We sent representatives to this meeting and will do so again, where we will coordinate closely with Senior Pugwash and the IS/YP conference held in the same venue.
  
  
• Thinkers Lodge, Pugwash, Nova Scotia: We are actively exploring opportunities to hold events at Thinkers Lodge when the pandemic allows us to safely meet again. In 2019, we co-sponsored a youth environmental conference there. The attendees decided to use our funding to purchase a tree that was planted on Thinkers Lodge grounds, and we are honored and humbled to literally be a part of their landscape.
  
  
• SciTech Institute: This organization maintains a network of 1,000 high school ambassadors who work on science communication projects in their communities. We are working to provide them with communications infrastructure, and to integrate our Rotblat Society members as mentors to these great students.
  
  
• STGlobal: This group holds an annual conference for graduate students working in policy on STEM issues; we are also providing them with communications infrastructure and will be involved with their virtual conference next April.
  

Of course, when our Alliances put us in front of new students who have not yet heard of Pugwash, it's our hope that many of them will be attracted to us for the same reasons that brought them to the host organization, and we'll be informing our student members about the opportunities available in those groups.

Pugwash Webinars Coming in January 2021

Pugwash will be launching a series of webinars in January, 2021 on a range of issues related to ethical issues in science, technology, and international security. Topics and dates are TBD, but we've already decided that these webinars will be a combination of panel discussions followed by breakout groups in the audience to engage all participants. These webinars will be archived on our website, and provided in a podcast also due to launch at that time. Watch for announcements on the blog on our website.

Think We Must Exhibit at Central Michigan University

Student Pugwash provided materials to the Think We Must installation at Central Michigan University as a member of their "thought community." Think We Must investigates the philosophical, ethical, legal and spiritual dimensions of organized violence and the ways in which inquiry and rational activity are used in its service, with a special focus on the testing of nuclear weapons, their use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the International Law that has developed in response.

Our poster for the exhibit is here, an excerpt from a speech given by Joseph Rotblat at the 1999 Student Pugwash international conference in San Diego.

Student Pugwash Presentation at IEEE ISTAS 2020

Rachel Svetanoff, Vice-Chair, represented SPUSA at the IEEE International Symposium on Technology & Society 2020 last Saturday, November 14th. Speaking right after NASA, Rachel expounded on our role in history, what we’re currently up to, and how we address gaps in the pedagogy of social responsibility, in the presentation Student Pugwash USA: Perspectives on Social Responsibility in Science & Technology. Excerpted from the presentation's abstract: “We don't tell students what to think or what's ethical; we provide the framework such that making ethical choices, as each student decides what those are, is part and parcel of the work they do currently and later as professionals.”

Rachel says:

I knew I was talking to the future of Pugwash when I stayed for the subsequent panel on "What should tech in the public interest look like for Gen Z?" and the first slide was of Jeff Goldblum’s poignant statement, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.”

We are excited by the programs we're launching, but that isn't all. Any member can propose a new program, or bring forward an interesting Alliance for us to co-sponsor and support. As we launch our new memberships, we face the chicken-and-egg problem: we need a vibrant membership, some of whom participate in our online communities, in order to provide the compounding value of network effect to each other and new members.

Our memberships are seeded with people from the Pugwash Movement, but we also need you—the friends and alumni of Student Pugwash—to play a crucial role in building our communities. And not least of which, to provide us with the financial support we need to make our programs and student empowerment mission a success. If you haven't already, please considering joining as a member, or donating now, on Giving Tuesday, or as part of your end-of-year philanthropy.

As always, we want to hear from you. Drop us a line anytime.