There are literally thousands of organizations whose work and events overlap with ours, ranging from huge organizations to informal science book clubs that might meet in certain communities (looking at you, Silicon Valley and Research Triangle Park). In the nonprofit world—especially for organizations vying for the attention of busy students with a dozen extracurriculars—most of the time, overlapping groups like these see themselves in competition. And in some cases, they are, when several nonprofits go to the same funders for grant support.
Our goal with our Affiliates is to further our mission of social responsibility in science and technology with programs and organizations run elsewhere. We publicize their events, activities, and requests for assistance to our members, and we support their programs when they're on-mission for us. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel—if another organization is running a great program, we'll add our resources to make it even better.
One of the reasons we started the Rotblat Society and switched to membership support is so we can act as a better conduit and centralized directory of Pugwash-related activities, events, and organizations. Our self-interest is promoting our mission, but our bottom line financial self-interest is recruiting new members—which we're confident we'll do just by co-sponsoring your programs to let people know about us. We're not in competition with nonprofits for their grants, and we're not in competition for big money from their donors. And with our Virtual Chapter initiative, we're not (much) in competition with other student organizations. So if your group promotes science, works on STEM issues, or explores ethical issues related to the above, we want to talk to you.
We are still in progress on developing the Affiliate program. If you know of an organization that should be connected to ours to promote their activities and volunteer opportunities to our members—especially if they're willing to do the same for us—get in touch and check back here for updates.
