Coping with the subjects of death and grief remain some of life’s greatest challenges. For those who are not part of a religious framework or community – and do not wish to be – what can be offered as a substitute for the emotional comfort that religious faith offers those in facing their own death or the death of their loved ones? How can we find ways to adapt ritual technology to support ourselves and our communities on the long and challenging path of loss and bereavement?
Guest speaker: Rachel Rose Reid
Rachel is a spoken word artist, writer & storyteller grappling directly with these questions. Raised on a hotchpotch of immigrant heritage, English folk and concrete jungle, Rachel plays with storytelling through the creation and adaptation of folk rituals and practices for meeting real and pressing needs in contemporary life.
Rachel aims to show that the art of reclaiming, renewing, and restoring ritual practice in everyday life is for everyone, and is most often made by people making do with what they have available to them, which can be enough.
It’s time for us to gather outdoors! This year we’re going to have four picnics on 2 July, 16 July, 6 August, and 20 August. Bring picnic blankets, food, board games, and acoustic musical instruments. We’ll sing a few songs and have a few laughs.
All four picnics are planned to be held at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. If the weather looks less than ideal, we’ll meet under the bandstand
From Shame to Pride, Fear to Joy – We are all our own master Alchemists.
Chris Fitchew is part jester, part comedian, full joy alchemist and space holder who has travelled the world to hone his crafts, including working with plant medicines in Peru, vortex energy healing and working with many great teachers and Wisdom Sharers. He believes that one of the greatest access points in finding our purpose and self-healing is through laughter, joy, and play; for ourselves and our communities.
Chris brings his life story to this Sunday Assembly London Pride special, as he shares how he managed to pivot and transmute a childhood of shame to a life of pride, and fears a plenty into Joy in abundance.
Tom Ana will be the guest poet for this Assembly. They are a nonbinary writer and facilitator from the North of England, and run the Queer Poetry Circle, a space that aims to create a new oral tradition through exploring poetry; Queer Spiritual Explorers, a group for interfaith exploration for LGBTQ+ people, and are a co-facilitator at the Queer Death Café.
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.
Today, the options and freedoms on offer to LGBTQ+ people living in the West are greater than ever before. But is same-sex marriage, improved media visibility and corporate endorsement all it’s cracked up to be? At what cost does this acceptance come? And who is getting left behind, particularly in parts of the world where LGBTQ+ rights aren’t so advanced?
For this Pride special Sunday Assembly we are so excited to have journalist Amelia Abraham coming to speak with us. Amelia will be talking about her latest book Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture, where she travels to 8 countries in the West looking at the unprecedented levels of acceptance and visibility on offer to LGBTQ+ people and looks at some of the potential drawbacks and catches. Here, for Pride month, she explains what she learned along the way, and asks what we really mean when we talk about LGBTQ+ equality.
Amelia Abraham is a journalist from London. She has worked as an editor at Vice, Refinery29 and Dazed. Her main interest is LGBTQ+ identity politics, and she has written on this topic for the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Times, the New Statesman, ES Magazine, i-D and Vogue.
We also have the wonderful Jenny Foulds coming to perform some spoken word for us!
Then we’ll also be doing our usual: Mass singalongs to some of our favourite power ballads, hearing stories from a number of our community and drinking a vat of tea afterwards.
If you come along to Sunday Assembly London, chances are you live in this urban jungle we call home. How connected to you feel to nature in your day to day concrete-life? Do you want to take a journey back to the wilder version of yourself? – Then this assembly is for you! And before you ask, no, we aren’t all going to be hopping on a bus to the forest!
This assembly will be our last for summer (we are back in September) so we wanted to set you up for some outdoor adventures. We are so excited to have Tony Riddle along to speak with us! Tony has spent twenty years studying the modern condition and working on ways to free us from its constraints to achieve total wellness.
“If we can recognise where nature is missing from our lives we can reconnect with it and fall back in love with it, and in doing so can shake the angst-inducing monkey off our collective back” – sounds good, right?
We also have the wonderful Anj Cairns coming to perform some spoken word for us and Katherine Sirrell is Trying Her Best.
Then we’ll also be doing our usual: Mass singalongs to some of our favourite power ballads, hearing stories from a number of our community and drinking a vat of tea afterwards.
Community Picnics
4th and 18th August 2019, 11:00am
Now that Sunday Assembly is on its usual summer break from Conway Hall, there’s no need to miss us too much! Join us in the nearby Lincoln’s Inn Fields from 11am this Sunday for a Potluck Picnic (feel free to bring things to share with labels for eating preferences), a Summer Song Singalong, Lawn Games, Board Games, Pavement Poetry and a free Ukulele class (bring your own Uke if you want to join in!). Dogs welcome too!
This September 1st we’re returning to Conway Hall fresh off our summer break to discuss one of the biggest trending topics of 2019 – WASTE.
It’s estimated that only 4% of over 295 BILLION pieces of plastic thrown away annually in the UK is actually being recycled. Are we being lied to about recycling? Because clearly, recycling is not enough.
We’re super excited to hear from Daniel Webb, founder of Everyday Plastic, as our main speaker. Daniel was commissioned to make a giant mural of all the plastic he threw away in a year, and then co-authored “Everyday Plastic: what we throw away and where it goes” with scientist Dr Julie Schneider, based on his analysis, which he’ll be talking about on the day.
We’re also kicking-off 4 months of SA London Labs, where we’ll be experimenting with all the elements that make Sunday Assembly, bringing in community ideas and getting collaborative to make our community the best we can be!
As always alongside that we will have some wonderful spoken word from Binky Hyde, mass singalongs to some of our favourite pop songs, hearing stories from a member of our community and drinking a vat of tea afterwards.
Ever find yourself scrolling mindlessly through your feed with a niggling feeling you could be doing something more satisfying? Or returned from a holiday wondered whether it had really been worth it?
This coming Sunday, author and speaker James Wallman talks to us about his life-changing rules for creating exciting and enriching experiences, and making the most of our leisure time in the face of an ever-longer list of things to do!
Then we have the wonderful Anj Cairns coming to do some found poetry for us as well as our usual: Mass singalongs to some of our favourite pop songs, hearing stories from a member of our community and drinking a vat of tea afterwards.
We’re also continuing SA London Labs, where we’ll be experimenting with all the elements that make Sunday Assembly, bringing in community ideas and getting collaborative to make our community the best we can be!
Our Incredible Ocean
6th October 2019, 11:00am
Speaker: Caroline Riggs
The ocean covers 71% of the Earth’s surface and contains some of the most amazing creatures on this planet. We’ll be taking some time on Sunday 6th October to wonder at just how incredible they are.
Caroline Riggs is the granddaughter of a lighthouse keeper, and she innately loves the seas, spending her spare time convincing everyone they should love them too! She works with Incredible Oceans, an organisation telling critical ocean-saving stories through the arts and science.
Our host, Sanderson Jones, will also be introducing amazing spoken word performance, someone from the community telling us how they’re Trying Their Best, and then mass singalongs to some of our favourite pop songs and drinking a vat of tea afterwards!
We’re also continuing SA London Labs, where we’ll be experimenting with all the elements that make Sunday Assembly, bringing in community ideas and getting collaborative to make our community the best we can be!
We’re thrilled to be bringing you this weekends Sunday Assembly as part of the Bloomsbury Festival. Small Steps, Big Ideas is a celebration of endeavour, progress, and pioneering achievements.
Our speakers this week are from Jangala, a UK-based charity dedicated to enabling internet access for people in need of urgent humanitarian aid or longer-term development assistance.
In situations of natural and manmade disaster, existing communications networks can fail – exactly when the need for them is the greatest. Jangala have developed Big Box, a piece of equipment which enables WiFi – something so essential during humanitarian emergencies, where coordination and communication are vital.
Our host, Sanderson Jones, will also be introducing amazing spoken word performance, someone from the community telling us how they’re Trying Their Best, and then mass singalongs to some of our favourite pop songs and drinking a vat of tea afterwards!
We’re also continuing SA London Labs, where we’ll be experimenting with all the elements that make Sunday Assembly, bringing in community ideas and getting collaborative to make our community the best we can be!
Social Mobility
3rd November 2019, 11:00am
Speaker: Rachael Catherine
Poet: Dennis Evans
The social structure of the UK has historically been highly influenced by the concept of social class, which continues to affects our society today. Statistics tell us that children of highly paid individuals are more likely to end up in highly paid careers and children of low paid individuals are more likely to be low earners. If you’re someone born into a lower socioeconomic bracket, how do you break out of that cycle? – This is social mobility, the subject of our assembly this week.
We are thrilled to have Rachael Catherine speaking with us at this assembly. Rachael is a young Mancunian with council estate roots and passion firmly placed in tackling class inequality. She works for RECLAIM, a youth-leadership and social change charity, working with working class young people with an aim of ending leadership inequality.
Most of her work is centred in the belief that too few social change leaders come from the backgrounds of the problems they seek to address – particularly from personal experience, she wants to promote the idea that lived experience should be valued as expertise.
We will have an amazing spoken word performance from Dennis Evans and someone from the community telling us how they’re Trying Their Best.
Then as usual, mass singalongs to some of our favourite pop songs and drinking a vat of tea afterwards!
We’re also continuing SA London Labs, where we’ll be experimenting with all the elements that make Sunday Assembly, bringing in community ideas and getting collaborative to make our community the best we can be!
If you’re lucky enough to be a resident of Hackney or Tower Hamlets you’ll by now have completed your practice Census for the Office for National Statistics. Census 2021 is a few years away yet, but it’s got us thinking about numbers and statistics!
In this assembly we are thrilled to have mathematician Zoe Griffiths speaking with us. Zoe will explore the multitude of ways outrageous conclusions can seemingly legitimately be reached using statistics, from misrepresentation of data to people lying in surveys. Expect a humorous journey through the subject area and the chance to take part in some live experiments. This talk is your chance to do some very bad statistics and also learn how to avoid these classic pitfalls.
We will also have some performing arts and someone from the community telling us how they’re Trying Their Best.
Then as usualy, mass singalongs to some of our favourite pop songs and drinking a vat of tea afterwards!
We’re also continuing SA London Labs, where we’ll be experimenting with all the elements that make Sunday Assembly, bringing in community ideas and getting collaborative to make our community the best we can be!
Please remember, 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.
What gives your life purpose? How do you bring fire and passion to the work you do? Caroline Ludbrook, this week’s main speaker, inspires others to greatness as a regional manager for Shannon Trust, a charity which aims to teach people in the prison system to learn to read. But Caroline’s path to finding her purpose in life began much earlier, when she started volunteering with the Brownies at age 14. Caroline’s years as a Brownie leader have taught her how to find the passion within herself to not only achieve her own goals, but help others to reach theirs.
In addition to Caroline’s inspiring talk, we’ll also belt out some of our favourite sing-along pop tunes, hear how a member of the community is Trying Their Best, and afterwards, celebrate with tea and cake.
We’re also continuing SA London Labs by experimenting with all the elements that compose Sunday Assembly, gathering feedback from everyone in attendance and collaborating to make our community the best it can be!
For our last assembly of the year, our main speaker is Harry Cliff, the renowned particle physicist who puts the ‘cool’ in Newton’s Law of Cooling! He will take us on a journey through the life cycle of stars, and explain how one in particular may have had an enormous impact on the story of Christmas: The Star of Bethlehem.
We will also hear poetry from our very own Jenny Mitchell, joint winner of the annual Geoff Stevens’ Memorial Poetry Prize. Her debut collection, Her Lost Language, is the Poetry Kit Book of the Month for November 2019.
And we’ll sing some of our favourite sing-along pop tunes (including a couple of Christmas classics to get you in the spirit for our upcoming Yule Rock!), and celebrate afterwards with tea and cake.
This assembly will be the final experiment of SA London Labs, in which we have played with all the elements that compose Sunday Assembly, gathering feedback from everyone in attendance and collaborating to make our community the best it can be. Please be sure to leave your feedback on the paper slips placed on each seat.
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