Brendan C. Helliwell

Brendan C. Helliwell is a student and freethinker, and a life-long skeptic, naturalist, and rationalist.

Helliwell has been active in the community all his life, as the Living Desert's youngest Docent and an amateur radio operator volunteering in emergency services, but has recently taken to political causes as well. He has made space advocacy, antiwar activism, and the promotion of humanism, rationality and public science literacy his mission.

Currently he is a radio personality and Station Manager at KCOD Radio & Television in Palm Desert, a Living Desert Docent, and a Target team member. Helliwell is involved as co-organizer of Come Home America, a libertarian/conservative antiwar coalition; of the Secular Student Alliance, which promotes secularism, rationalism, and public science education; and of the recently reformed College of the Desert Student Journalist Society, which spearheaded the creation of KCOD Radio & Television. He is deeply involved with the Occupy movement, being one of the principle organizers of Occupy Coachella Valley, one of the first fifty of what is now thousands of Occupations.

His action is driven by his strong ethical stances. His passion for virtue ethics, his embrace of Enlightenment humanism and libertarianism, and his conviction that social justice begins with individuals is what leads him to focus his energy to further the causes of science, reason, and liberty.

Helliwell has been honored with the Coachella Valley Archaeological Society Scholarship and an honorary membership, the Anthropology Student of the Year award from College of the Desert, the Above and Beyond Award from the Living Desert, and placed third in the Nunn-Russo Writing Contest in 2008. He is a life member of the International Society for Philosophers and Phi Theta Kappa, and an undergraduate member of the American Anthropological Association, National Association of Student Anthropologists, and the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. He is also an ordained secular humanist minister.