Sometimes life is a coin toss. Sometimes it’s a foregone conclusion. The problem is telling the difference, but this is a skill you can improve. Whether you want to know how your next date will go or who will win the US election, you can learn when to be confident and when to be uncertain. Nathan Young, a forecaster at the Swift Centre, has a few tips for adding predictions into your toolkit. You’ll enjoy it. Probably.
Nathan predicts events in geopolitics, AI and pandemics, and builds forecasting tools online. He also founded the Coronavirus Tech Handbook. Beyond that, he likes singing and hosting community dinners. If you have an idea for a forecasting question, he’d love to hear it at @nathanpmyoung on twitter.
We’re also very much looking forward to Hannah Deasy in our poetry slot! Hannah offers hard -hitting, vulnerable and often hilarious spoken word. Unpredictable, raw, warm and not afraid to dish the dirt on the state of her mental health, she holds crowds gripped with her personal true stories, skilfully intertwined with supremely well observed jokes.
Dance occupies a funny place in the English psyche; can you think of an activity we engage with so enthusiastically and regularly, but also so badly. Why was it banned by Oliver Cromwell and the priest in Footloose? Why was the government so threatened by “music wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”? When society wants us to be cerebral observers of culture, dance allows us to be visceral participants.
We’re delighted to have our very own Alan Gregan deliver a talk on how we in England live, how we dance and how we can use dance to explore and practise different ways of living. Alan is a dancer, a teacher and a Sunday Assembly community member. He has been learning styles under the swing umbrella for 12 years and teaching since 2015.
We will also have Emma Fisher deliver a movement workshop that explores what it might be like to tune into the language of our bodies, developing internal connectivity to allow for greater outer expressivity, and beginning to re-choreograph narratives about self, other and community. Emma is a professional dancer and registered Dance Movement Psychotherapist. Her performance career has taken her across 5 continents, collaborating with artists and choreographers.
Sunday Assembly London has grown from a tiny egg of an idea from comedians Pippa Evans and Sanderson Jones into a totally rad double-digits ten-year-old. And like all the cool kids, we had a birthday party to celebrate!
Like all the best parties, there was cake, games, candles to blow out and a magician. Yes, we partied and have a good time with a real-life maker of magic.
We also sang along to some much-loved classic pop tunes, as voted for by members of the community.
Happy New Year, and happy 9th birthday to Sunday Assembly!
We’ve got a lot to celebrate, but we want to make sure we’re celebrating in a way that is completely by choice, not hindered by social pressure or habit. That’s why we invited Laura Willoughby, co-founder of Club Soda, to be our main speaker at this assembly.
Laura taught us all about ‘mindful drinking’, and how we can empower ourselves to make conscious decisions about our alcohol consumption.
This assembly was hosted by street art blogger at Inspiring City, Stu Holdsworth. We got the party started with some rockin’ tunes performed by the Sunday Assembly band as well as our returning guest performer, Gecko! And Emmy Broomfield gave a talk about their own mindful drinking journey.
Later in the afternoon we had lunch at Nando’s and took a group trip to Club Soda’s pop-up storefront to taste some delicious alcohol-free beverages.
Happy New Year, and happy 8th birthday to Sunday Assembly!
In honour of this special occasion, we invited Olivier award-winning comedian and Sunday Assembly co-founder Pippa Evans to be our main speaker! Pippa has been very productive during the pandemic, performing with the Showstoppers and translating her acclaimed self-improvement course “Improv Your Life” into book form. She realised that life is one big improvisation and all of our interactions with the world are made of quick decisions based on what’s available to us.
Pippa taught us some of the skills she has learned as an improv comedian and how they can be applied to every ‘scene’ in our lives.
Hosted by co-founder of Sunday Assembly and founder of The Lifefulness Project Sanderson Jones, this assembly also had poetry by Dan Simpson (@dansimpsonpoet), a member of the community talking about how they’re “Trying Their Best”, and fun sing-along songs by the Sunday Assembly Band.
Because of the current government restrictions, we cannot meet at Conway Hall in Holborn, so our meeting was held on Zoom instead and livestreamed to YouTube.
Happy 7th Birthday, Sunday Assembly! For our first assembly of the year, we will gather to learn how we can make changes for the better, both in our personal lives and in the world around us.
Our main speaker, Margot Raggett, lived the corporate lifestyle in London for 20 years before undertaking a total change of direction at the age of 40. Seeing a poached elephant changed her life forever and set her off on a path to become one of the world’s most successful conservation book publishers. Margot will share that journey during her talk and why having a purpose has given her more satisfaction than climbing the career ladder ever did.
We welcome the return of comedic singer/songwriter Gecko! His album, Volcano, is available on Spotify.
We’ll sing some epic pop tunes together with our live band and hear from the chair of our board, Sarah Morgan, about Sunday Assembly’s plans for 2020 and beyond. And we’ll end by drinking a vat of tea, eating birthday cake, and talking with friends new and old.
Our first assembly for 2019 AND our 6th ‘golden’ Birthday! What a date!
Join us in kicking 2019 off with a bombastic BANG and celebrate the past 6 years of Sunday Assembly with 6 of our favourite people from the past year on the 6th of Jan!
It’s a total treat and call us greedy, but, to celebrate this momentous date we will be having not one but TWO speakers, TWO poets and TWO Trying My Best speakers from yesteryear! Don’t say we don’t spoil you!
We are so excited to have Tiu de Haan back to talk to us about the importance of rituals and lead us in a Sunday Assembly ritual. Tiu is a ritual designer, creative facilitator, inspirational speaker, voiceover artist and musician. She creates experiences designed to connect us to our creativity, to each other, to ourselves and to the possibility of wonder.
Our second speaker is Shamash Alidina, co-founder of the Museum of Happiness, author of Mindfulness for Dummies and all round expert on Kindfulness! Shamash will be leading us on an extra special mediation to get our heads in the right space for the year ahead!
This Sunday Assembly will be hosted by our co-founder Sanderson Jones and we will have two of our favourite poets from 2018 performing.
We’ll also be doing our usual: mass singalongs to some of our favourite power ballads, an awesome spoken word artist, hearing stories from a number of our community and drinking a vat of tea afterwards.
We all know that Sunday Assembly London is there to help everyone celebrate life, but this gathering isn’t just a celebration, it’s a party! Bring your party hats and put on your party clothes. Get ready for an all star line up, including Rufus Hound as our speaker, who thought he might be a vicar some years ago, but then became a comedian, actor and all round TV & radio superstar!’
Tying in with our theme of Light in the Darkness, Rufus spoke about the role of hope in our lives, how faith can provide it and how those without faith can still can embrace it.
Rufus told us that his first idea was ‘to cover myself in sparklers and run down The Tube but the so called “Health and Safety” brigade said it was “stupid” to the “point of borderline psychotic”.’
We sang some of our favourite power ballads from over the last five years, looked back on how far we (each and every one of us) have come in the last five years and looked into the future (like Mystic Meg but without the crystal ball) and to all the wonder we can bring to the world.
Sunday Assembly is 4 years old and we’re going to party in style! Bring your party hats, put on your Sunday best and let’s get ready to celebrate us celebrating life as a community for all this time!
As well as having a party, we’re going to hear from one of our favourite speakers of all time, Shamash Alidina. He wowed us at the Conference Called Wonder and we’re so excited to have him at Sunday Assembly London. Shamash is speaking on kindfulness: a meditation and way of living that’s relaxing, calming and fun!
Mindfulness is so last year! Start 2017 with a relaxed, fun and transformative attitude to life, with a powerful combination of mindfulness, kindness and compassion. Mindfulness comes mostly from ancient eastern traditions, and science finds it to be effective for better health, wellbeing and performance. But…these ancient traditions also included lots of self-kindness and friendliness towards yourself and others, which can easily be lost through just trying to practice mindfulness alone.
Discover how to go from being a control freak to a kindness freak.
Experience a kindfulness exercise to cultivate joy, clarity and resilience.
Discover how kindfulness can help reduce suffering.
Understand why science is implementing kindness and compassion practices to overcome stress, anxiety, depression, and build a more resilience brain.
What a treat we’re in for! And if that’s not enough, we’ll be singing our hearts out, hearing stories from members of the community, drinking a vat of tea/coffee and eating a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.
BSL interpretation will be provided.
We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!
The Sunday Assembly was started by Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, two comedians who were on the way to a gig in Bath when they discovered they both wanted to do something that was like church but totally secular and inclusive of all—no matter what they believed.
The first ever Sunday Assembly meeting took place on January 6th 2013 at The Nave in Islington. Almost 200 people turned up at the first meeting, 300 at the second and soon people all over the world asked to start one.
Three years later there are 68 Sunday Assembly chapters in 8 different countries where people sing songs, hear inspiring talks, and create community together.
Come and celebrate with us and hear stories of how Sunday Assembly has created something beautiful, complete with epic songs and cake!
Happiness
19th January 2016, 11:00am
Speaker: Sir Anthony Seldon
This week we’re talking about happiness, and we have a pretty amazing speaker – Sir Anthony Seldon, co-founder of Action for Happiness and author of 25 books on contemporary history, politics and education, including biographies of Tony Blair, “Trust” and “An end to Factory Schools”.
He will be talking about finding your inner song or unique purpose in life.
Read more about him and how he threw out GCSE’s and brought in a happiness curriculum at Wellington College here.
We’ll also sing brilliant songs, celebrate life and drink tea together. Come join us and find out how to live better, help often and wonder more.
Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.
Individuals start countries all the times, for many reasons. Some of these folks are grumpy and impatient. Some folks are dreamers and want to establish a community where there is peace, harmony, and lots of sex/drugs/classical music. Some country-creators are individualists or wannabe royals. Often it’s a combination of all of the above.
Paul has been intrigued by the idea of creating your own country since he was invited to join a modern version of the Knights Templar, which was planning to buy, and govern, an island in the Caribbean.
He’ll review some of the more imaginative “micro-nations,” offer the legal perspective (yes, there’s an international convention that applies) and tell you how his Knights Templar adventure worked out.
As well as this amazing talk, we meet to sing great songs, hear inspiring talks and drink tea together. Come join us and find out how to live better, help often and wonder more.
Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.
Come and join us at Sunday Assembly London to hear all about boredom.
The fantastic Linda Rodriguez McRobbie is a writer and journalist who is fascinated by getting bored! She will be asking “Why do we get bored? And have we always been doing it?”. Have a read of her article for the Smithsonian mag to get you excited!
As well as our super smart speaker, we have the generally fabulous Jennifer Lack who will be talking about how she’s trying her best and we’ll be pulling some shapes and singing some tunes to boot. Don’t forget that we drink a vat of tea/cofee and a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.
We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!
Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.
Vision
6th March, 11:00am
On March 6th we want you to join us for an Assembly with a twist. We want to speak to you about Sunday Assembly in 2016 AND we want to hear from you about what YOU want.
That’s right on Sunday March 6th we are going to spend a day casting a vision of Sunday Assembly London, and part of that vision is you.
Sunday Assembly London is nothing, nada, zip, rien without our incredible community. That’s you – you beautiful hunk of meat, bones and brain. We have done so much since we started but at the same time we are just getting going. We are on the foothills, on March 6th we’re going to try to have a look at the top of the mountain!
The question is: is this vision assembly for you? To help you out we’ve come up with a handy test.
Are you regular? This is for you Are you semi-regular? This is for you. Are you occasional? This is for you. Are you new? This is for you. Did you join the Facebook group by accident? This is for you. Did you get the point? This is for you.
We want as many folk there as possible as we lay out the incredible journey that we want to go on with you, what you can expect from us and how we can build a loving community where everyone lives life as fully as possible.
This is the first assembly of this type that we’ve ever done – we’d be honoured to have you there.
Come and join us for a Play themed Sunday Assembly!
Our speaker is the fantastic play fanatic, Dr. David Bramwell. He’s not only a Sony-award winning presenter for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 but also an award winning performer, picking up ‘Best Comedy’ and Outstanding Theatre’ at Brighton Fringe Festival. He will explore the role of the trickster in myth and real-life, arguing that chaos, deceit and amorality are qualities to be celebrated!
David is the author of the No9 Bus to Utopia and host of Brighton’s Catalyst Club, where everyday folk share their passions with a live audience.
Don’t forget it’s also our Bake Sale this Sunday. We’re raising money for the awesome homeless charity The Choir with No Name – so please get your apron on and start baking!
Together with the talk, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs and drink a vat of tea/coffee and a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.
We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!
Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.
This week we are joined by the very amazing Dr Harry Cliff. He is a particle physicist at Cambridge University and the Large Hadron Collider as well as the in-house physicist at the Science Museum.
Dr Cliff will be speaking to us about ‘The Joy of Not Knowing’. The more we learn about the world we live in, the more we realise just how spectacularly ignorant we are.
Science is full of big unanswered questions; what is the invisible 95% of the universe made from? Can consciousness be explained by neuroscience? Is there life on Mars? Particle physicist Harry Cliff will explain why he finds not knowing the answer exciting, and discuss some of the deep mysteries of fundamental physics.
Wow!
Together with the talk, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs and drink a vat of tea/coffee and a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.
We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!
Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.
We are being joined by our speaker Michael Matania, who works on behalf of the Mental Health charity Mind, where he spends his days spreading awareness on tools and techniques that help people to stay happy, healthy and well whilst coping with the challenges of life. Michael also co-founded The Present Moment Project, a social enterprise that seeks to make mindfulness training widely accessible to the most marginalised and hard to reach groups.
He will be discussing our addiction to thought, talking from his own experience of mental health problems. Michael will explore how moment-by-moment experience is clouded by worries about the imagined future, regrets about the past and a frustration with our present circumstances and will look at how it is possible to flip this situation on its head.
Together with the talk, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs and drink a vat of tea/cofee and eat a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.
BSL interpretation will be provided by volunteers Lauren Harris and Paul Hollingdrake!
We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!
Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil: Living Life to the Full as a Deafblind Person
Ben Fletcher was born profoundly deaf and also has RP (retinitis pigmentosa), which means that he is gradually losing his sight. And yet Ben is one of the happiest people in London! He will talk about how meditation, positivity and finding his own community have helped him to accept and rejoice in his differences, find inner peace and joy and lead a life he loves. This talk is part of Deaf Awareness Week.
Together with the talk, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs (which Lauren has chosen) and drink a vat of tea/coffee and eat a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.
Poetry will be provided by Sunday Assembly favourite Raymond Antrobus – poet, performer and hearing aid user. BSL interpretation will be provided by volunteers Lauren Harris and Kathleen Gillan.
There’ll be a bake sale after the Assembly – so please donate a cake if you can.* We’ll be raising money for Sunday Assembly to attend this year’s Pride march in June.
We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!
Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.
* If you would like to donate a cake, please bear in mind: no raw eggs, but fine if cooked. No fresh cream, but butter cream or the stuff can buy in tubs is ok. Also let us know if it contains nuts. They’ll be sold for £1 per item, so please portion into slices beforehand if possible.
Our theme for the week is Curiosity and we are being joined by the very brilliant Steve Mould part of the comedy team, The Spoken Nerd.
From mind-bending tricks on BBC 1’s Britain’s Brightest and element-hunting on ITV’s I Never Knew That About Britain, to dismantling a child’s robot to make it talk backwards “like the devil”, Steve’s scientific interests are unfettered by the limitations of specialism. On any given day, Steve might be leading a dubstep subatomic particle safari, putting nail varnish on a pineapple (for maths) or dressing up as a Lego man (also for maths).
Through his curiosity he accidentally discovered a phenomenon that no one could explain. This this the story of gravity defying beads that starts inSteve’s garage and ends 50 meters up a crane outside BBC Broadcasting House.
Together with the talk, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs, drink a vat of tea/coffee and eat a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.
BSL interpretation will be provided by volunteer Lauren Harris.
We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!
Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.
We are over the moon to announce that Sofie Hagan [sic] is our keynote speaker for Sunday Assembly on the 5th June. She will talk about her fat stomach, her wobbly thighs, her floppy arms and all of her chins and fat and how and why she learned to embrace and love every single kilogram of it.
Sofie’s assured, informed and deeply personal comedy has made her a star in the UK and throughout Europe. Last year Sofie won the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer with her debut show ‘Bubblewrap’. The show has since enjoyed two runs at the Soho Theatre, London and has been broadcast on BBC Three and BBC iPlayer as part of the series ‘Live from the BBC’. This year Sofie was invited to perform at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, adding the ever-expanding list of countries and festivals she has played. With sell-out solo shows and numerous projects in development Sofie is one of the most in-demand new voices going.
Together with Sofie, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs, drink a vat of tea/cofee and eat a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.
BSL interpretation will be provided by volunteer Lauren Harris.
We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!
Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.
The keynote speaker for Sunday Assembly London on the 19th June is the fantastic Ernesto Moreno.
Ernesto was 9 years old when his mother tragically died in a car accident in which he was also travelling along with his younger brother and sister. However, that was only the beginning of what was to be a very difficult childhood and adolescence, a story that was going to include physical abuse, drugs and alcoholism.
Ernesto’s life was always filled with strong emotional difficulty. The struggle continued and at the age of 23, Ernesto decided to leave his home country, Venezuela, in search of a new life. He arrived in London 13 years ago with only £300 in his pocket, he didn’t know anyone and spoke hardly any English. Ernesto found work collecting the dirty laundry in a hotel and doing the washing up in a restaurant. Three years later he had completed a Masters in Business and had started his first business as well as working as a Management Consultant in The City. Anyone would have thought that at this point Ernesto was a fulfilled and happy man, but he went on to achieve even greater things in the years to come. In 2012, after having built a very successful career as a business consultant working for companies such as PwC, Ernesto decided to quit his job and continue his journey as an entrepreneur and pursue even bigger dreams. Ernesto’s life story is inspiring, a testament of resilience and the constant search for meaning and fulfilment. During his talk at Sunday Assembly, Ernesto is going to be sharing with us his views on Life Purpose as well as some of his own life experiences.
This week Sunday Assembly London is curated by the Earlybird Speakers, a part of Toastmasters which helps people develop their public speaking skills.
As well as this inspiring talk, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs, drink a vat of tea/cofee and eat a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.
BSL interpretation will be provided by volunteer Lauren Harris.
We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!
Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.
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