Elizabeth Hegwood is the president of Gulf Coast Humanists and won the AHA’s Emerging Volunteer of the Year award in 2025. She rebooted her Biloxi, Mississippi humanist community incredibly quickly and has since created a truly admirable chapter structure that supports local humanists in everything from planning protests to simply making new friends. Elizabeth’s leadership is particularly special because of her excitement in helping other prospective chapter leaders start their own groups, especially in geographic areas where it seems like an uphill battle. 

When did you first become involved with your chapter, and what motivated you to join?

My name is Elizabeth Hegwood. I’m currently the chapter president of Gulf Coast Humanists, which is located on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. We’re about an hour east of New Orleans.

The group existed as a Facebook group beginning in 2011. I was not involved at that time. I met one of the members of that group through secular homeschooling. Apparently the group kind of fell apart during COVID and never really did anything after that.

My children grew up. One is in college and one is about to graduate. And I had some time on my hands. It’s a little bit selfish, I guess – I wanted to meet more like-minded friends for myself. I wanted to meet more secular friends, more progressive friends. So I asked the person who was running the Facebook group, “Do you need some help managing this?” And she said, “That would be great.” So I got involved at the end of 2024.

My real introduction was I took one of the classes that AHA offers through the Center for Education. I took James Croft’s philosophy class. In that class, I met Fish Stark and Joe Farkas. I was learning more about humanism, which I only had a surface-level understanding of, really. And then in January, after the election, I got my paperwork together and AHA made us a real chapter.

I thought if we became a chapter first, maybe I could get more people. I hosted a meeting at somebody’s house. And I was like, “Well, we’re an official chapter. What do we do?” Everyone was depressed about the election. I looked around the room. There were 12 of us there. And one of the moms there has a transgender daughter that I had known for several years. She said, “Well, I host these gatherings for trans teens, and we don’t have any money. There’s no sponsorship. I don’t have enough money to feed these kids.”

And I said, “That sounds so easy. That sounds great. We could just put a potluck meal together and feed all the kids.”

We planned to do that for February, and that was our first action. And it was so kind of small and simple. But that one, I really hold close to my heart because it was the first one we did, and it really meant a lot to the recipients. We showed up as allies. A lot of those families are food insecure anyway. That was kind of the beginning, and it’s all been upward from there.

It has expanded so much. We expanded into a lot of other spaces. We were in contact with an organization that services immigrants in the area and learned about which families were having their breadwinners detained or deported. And so we were doing food drives for those families because you’re out half an income and still got kids to feed. We started doing a lot of that kind of stuff. We started doing more social events. We started becoming heavily involved in protest planning.

How big is your organization? What has contributed to its growth?

In May 2025, I had 49 people on my email list. As of today, I have almost 400. And those are people that are signing up intentionally. I don’t add them. So the interest is there, and the growth has been a lot.

It’s coming from a lot of different places. When you table at a protest, that’s one easy way to let people know you exist. I go to as many community events as I can. Sometimes there will be a community event where different organizations are talking about what they’re doing. Meeting other people in those spaces, that brought us some growth.

There’s a lot of interest on social media. Facebook is kind of dying, I think. But Instagram works pretty well. Reddit works reasonably well. TikTok seems to be working very, very well.

So it’s kind of a multi-pronged approach. We don’t really have any money. You know, there’s some chapters out there that have some money in the bank, but we don’t. So we’ve got to do freeways, but it’s working.

I live in an area where there’s more secular people than you would think, but they don’t know where to go to find those communities. I think if I were in a metropolitan area, or maybe in another state, you’d have a lot of different organizations there with a visible presence, such as a brick and mortar building.

If you’re a religious person and you want a community, you just walk into a church. But here, you don’t know where to go. And so I think a lot of the growth here is also attributable to the fact that people have never known literally where to go to meet people like this. And I think that when you give somebody something that they’ve never had before, they just get really excited.

I think also here, there’s kind of an attitude of defeatism. Like, “That won’t work. I can’t try it. There’s nobody here. I can’t do it.” And that’s kind of all in your head, you know. And I mean, we’re kind of like living proof of that.

Your chapter clearly has a focus on action – what does that look like, in terms of programming? 

We’re at the point now where we have a meeting once a month, with a virtual link for people that can’t drive to meet in person. We generally do a potluck for that. Once we expanded it to a certain point, I realized I needed more hands for planning events. It was just me for a long time. We now have a social committee, an action and service committee, a fundraising committee, and a member care and welcoming committee, which I think is really important.

We do several social events. The social committee plans those events. We have an action committee that plans actions. We have done so many actions – dozens of food drives for immigrant kids. We just recently did a food drive for unhoused people in honor of Alex Pretti’s life. We did a vigil in honor of Renée Good’s life and other people that have been murdered by the federal government. We’ve done several protests in conjunction with other protest organizers and other organizations.

We have at least three or four social events every month, because we run out of seats. We have a coffee hour where I can RSVP a table for 20, and there’s always a waiting list. So we’re having to do more and more social events every month, which I think is really important because I think the friendship aspect and the community aspect are really foundational. I’ve been in spaces where actions were foundational, which is great, but I’m not sure that friendships are always happening in those spaces. And I think that there has to be an intentional way to foster those because I’m not sure that we can be healthy people or healthy activists if we don’t have a supportive community.

People are lonely and they’re isolated, and I think that’s really important. And that drives a lot of what I do. I’m trying to think more these days about how to bring that connection into anything we do, whether it’s a social event or a meeting or an action.

How is your organization “meeting the moment”?

I think there’s the immediate moment that can kind of change these days. And then there’s the larger moment that really doesn’t change – it’s kind of a universal moment.

We are meeting this immediate political moment for our area by directly supporting populations of people that are being targeted politically. We work with the trans community and we work with the immigrant community to try to get their needs met when we can do as much as we can.

But then there’s also the immediate need of growing visibility in an area of the deep south where people have not felt visible, where they haven’t felt like they’ve had a voice.

Beyond that, I think there’s a kind of an all-the-time moment that doesn’t really change with who’s in office or what’s going on politically. And that’s the basic need for empathy, for human connection, for finding a place where you can be your authentic self. And that’s all the time. I mean, that’s been the case for hundreds of years. It’s going to be true hundreds of years in the future. That moment is never going to change. We’re always going to be in that moment.

That, to me, is the most important part of what we do – because your circumstances are going to change. You’re going to have someone different in and out of office. But if you can foster that sense of authenticity, that to me is a moment that we always have to meet.

How do you envision the future of your chapter, and what resources will you need in order to get there? 

I would love to have a building. It doesn’t have to be big, but I would love to have a physical location where we could have meetings and people could stop by out of curiosity. Obviously we would need money to get there, but there’s a part of me too that really resists having to make decisions that are so dependent on money, you know? I’d like for us to be able to continue to operate in a mutual aid kind of way, if we can.

I do see the chapter growing. What I would really love is for the chapter to be able to thrive without me. Obviously none of us are going to be here forever. The goal is to build something that doesn’t need just one person to keep going. So I think about getting it to a place where it’s independent, and can kind of stand on its own legs. I think we’re definitely moving towards that.

What I would love to see is more chapters pop up in the state of Mississippi. And I would love to help foster that, and talk to other people who are out there in the state, or even maybe in Alabama or Louisiana. I would love for people to see that you can do it here – just because it doesn’t already exist doesn’t mean that it can’t. And I’d love to be able to help other chapters start from just a few people like we did, and get going.

People comment on my socials all the time: “Is there a chapter in Jackson, Mississippi?” “Is there one in the Delta?” I tell them the same thing every time, which is – there’s not. You’re going to have to do what I did, and start one. But I can tell you what we did. I can connect you with the right people.

If there’s somebody out there that wants to do that, then they’re welcome to contact me. I’m happy to help.