Donate to Siouxsie and double your money
Mark Honeychurch - 10th November 2025
Siouxsie Wiles is well known to the NZ Skeptics. She has long been an active member of our organisation, helping us out by running Skeptics in the Pub events, MCing and giving talks at our conferences, writing articles for our journal, promoting us in public and much, much more. To illustrate this, these are photos from Wikipedia of Siouxsie sitting on discussion panels at our 2013 and 2015 conferences:
During the early days of the COVID pandemic Siouxsie stepped up to help New Zealand, using her science communication skills to relay the latest health advice from scientists to the public. As many of you will be aware, this work attracted a lot of hate from anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and other angry, unreasonable people. Sadly her university didn’t step up alongside her, and failed to do enough to ensure she was safe. In the end, Siouxsie had to take the university to court to force them to take the kinds of steps that they should have been taking all along. You can read more about the case, and Siouxsie’s motivations, in an article she wrote recently for The Spinoff.
Sadly, even though she technically won her court case and costs, the process still left Siouxsie and her husband Steven (who used to be a committee member of the NZ Skeptics) massively out of pocket - around $400,000 or so in debt. Because of this, Siouxsie is fundraising to try to cover some of that debt. Most important is her loans, which are costing her interest every month. Thankfully the campaign is already nearly half way to reaching its goal, but we’d love to see it go further.
The NZ Skeptics fully support Siouxsie’s efforts in court, as we understand the importance of clear, down-to-earth science communication, and think that people like Siouxsie who step up into a public communication role should be offered practical help by their employers to increase their security. We would love to see our members support this worthy cause, so we’re making a donation-matching offer.
For the rest of the campaign, up to a limit of $2,000, for every dollar you donate to Siouxsie we will donate the same amount. Simply email us at news@skeptics.nz or respond to this email letting us know how much you’ve donated, and include a screenshot, email or other evidence of your donation, and we’ll add your donation to our spreadsheet. Just before the end of the fundraising we’ll add up the total donated and make a donation of the same amount to the campaign - but we won’t claim any of the awesome rewards she’s giving out to donors.
This offer also covers any donations you may already have made to Siouxsie’s fundraiser in the last week or more since it started, so if you’ve already donated please let us know as well.
Here’s a link to the fundraising page: