All proceeds from our Happiness & Its Causes conference will go to two non-profits: Liberation Prison Project, which I run, and Tse Chen Ling, a Buddhist center run by Michelle Stewart. We’re both part of the FPMT, a worldwide Buddhist organization, which has its main office in Portland. LPP and TCL share the same house at 399 Webster Street in San Francisco. Twelve people work here full time, and some of us live here – and these days almost every one of us is fully involved in working for the conference: it’s taken us over! The conference seems to be creating a lot of energy! People are very excited about it. There's no doubt we all want happiness, but it's true too that sometimes we have no idea how to find it or even whether it's possible. There are so many ideas about just what it is; usually we think of it as something we have to find, like a needle in a haystack. But I must say I like Buddha's very practical approach to it: he says that stable happiness is what comes when we get rid of all those painful states of mind that we know so well: anger, fear, jealousy, low self-esteem and the rest. It sounds almost too simple, but the more we think about it and practice it, the more it makes sense. Meanwhile, we're all working hard on making our conference happen: to provide a forum for all the amazing people we have lined up to talk about human happiness and how to achieve it, for ourselves and others. Kate MacDonald, for example, is the prison project’s Communications Coordinator: she does our bi-monthly newsletter and our website. The newsletter, Liberation, is a major part of the work we do to serve our community of students, who happen to live in prisons. They can’t access the internet, nor can they write to each other, so our newsletter is their lifeline. These days, though, Kate has had to leave the newsletter aside to work full time on marketing the conference – and we’re doing so much in our efforts to attract people to our conference! She’s being helped by Sarah Brooks, our Prisoner Support Coordinator, and Sarah Brown, our bookkeeper. Keisha Roberts is our graphic designer for the website and the newsletter (as well as for TCL), and she too is working almost full time on the conference. And our Teacher Coordinator Carina Rumrill is looking after our Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Australian nun Ven. Chokyi has just arrived from Sydney, where she works for the conference there, to take over the coordination of the organization of the entire event. She's helped by our new Office Manager Mike McEntee. A great team! The Bay Area has some 8 million inhabitants and we decided to focus mainly on them in our marketing. Our conference is on the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and we figured that the majority of people interested in attending Happiness & Its Causes would be from the Bay Area. It seems an appropriate thing to do during Thanksgiving – and we discovered that there are conventions and conferences throughout the week, including on Thanksgiving itself. (Apparently, some 30% of all people who come to this city, come for conferences and conventions.) We have ads on the back of fifty city buses, and next week we will have ads on the BART trains as well. We mailed 95,000 copies of our 20-pp program to people and have emailed hundreds of thousands. Sixty thousands post cards will be dropped at 2,000 places in the Bay Area and in Los Angeles. We even have ads in the form of magnets on the sides of our car! We have full page ads in the October and November issues of Common Ground, Bay Area Business Women, and November’s San Francisco Arts Monthly. And in August we had full page ads in Psychology Today, Mandala and Snow Lion. We had audio ads on a dozen podcasts with Personal Life Media; and we have our own podcast with Buddhist Geeks. We're doing our best to reach every one of you 8 million people! This is my first experience of organizing something like this, and I’m enjoying it immensely, but I have no idea what to expect. Everyone is telling me that most people will register for the conference in the last month. Let’s see if our hard work pays off!