Humane Education may be the most powerful key to building a peaceful, just, and healthy future for all. That’s why we at the Institute for Humane Education (IHE) are working to transform education through our programs, thought leadership, enduring community, and free resources for teachers and changemakers.
Our mission is to educate people to create a world in which all humans, animals, and nature can thrive.
We are helping people implement our award-winning Solutionary Framework, which anyone can use to assess local and global problems and create ethical, actionable solutions.
We provide resources and training for educators across the globe to prepare their students to build just, sustainable, and humane solutions to the problems in their communities and world.
In partnership with Antioch University, we offer graduate programs designed to enable people to teach about the interconnected issues of human rights, environmental sustainability, and animal protection.
We are building a future where all people, animals, and nature can flourish through our thought leadership that includes a podcast, books, essays, interviews, TEDx talks, and keynote presentations.
We design our educational materials, programs, and experiences to support:
IHE is founded on the premise that education is the one system that can change all other societal systems. Any lasting and successful shift in our response to the many challenges we are facing in our world rests with how we think and act in the decades ahead—especially with how the rising generations think and act. For that reason, we are dedicated to providing educators and institutions with tools and training to prepare their students to understand complex issues and to take action.
With 30 years of helping people mindfully integrate human rights, animal protection, and environmental sustainability topics into their teaching and outreach, we’ve built a community of humane educators and solutionaries who are changing lives and advancing a more just, healthy, and humane world for all.
Every teacher and changemaker we reach—through our resources, workshops, courses, talks, and graduate programs—goes on to reach many more. When we look at the ripples, we’ve impacted millions. Whether it’s alumni of our graduate programs starting programs, designing curricula, writing books and producing films, or launching social businesses; teachers bringing humane education to their classrooms; or kids taking action to solve problems they care about, the impacts grow year after year.
The video to the right shares the outcome of solutionary learning in one state—imagine this type of education worldwide.
Our values help define how we approach our mission as an organization; how we approach one another; and how we work with people and partners throughout the world.
As individuals and as an organization, we strive to…
We respond to cynicism and hopelessness with evidenced-based optimism and with a Solutionary Framework that provides a powerful process for building a just, healthy, and humane future.
Our staff, faculty, and board consist of passionate leaders in the field of humane education. These voices shape IHE into an ever-evolving, responsive organization.
We are fortunate to work with partnership institutions and organizations to more effectively advance positive change.
Create a free account to receive our monthly newsletter, access our full resource library, and join our online community.
“Changing the world one child at a time.” Those words have inspired my work for more than four decades in education, and they continue to inspire me now. We are at a pivotal point in the evolution of our world. We are facing a climate crisis, a health crisis, a crisis of racial justice, a crisis in our treatment of animals, a crisis of media bias. The list goes on. And perhaps our greatest crisis is our consistent struggle as a society to simply come together respectfully, intelligently, and ethically to solve our problems and save our planet. We need solutionaries. We need young people who have been educated not only to think critically, creatively, and systemically about real-world issues, but also to be passionate, persistent, and humane in their implementation of real-world solutions. And that is IHE’s mission: to support teachers and educational institutions in preparing young people to become solutionaries – and the next caretakers of our planet.
IHE offers a healing vision and a tangible pathway forward for a struggling world. As Executive Director, I am excited, humbled, and deeply honored to join with others to promote that vision and that pathway in ways that make them foundational to systems of education throughout the world – and to each child who is committed to making that world a better place.
Passionate about preparing young people to lead lives of joy and purpose, Steve Cochrane has had a remarkable journey through the field of education. It is a journey that has taken him from the campus of Princeton University, where he served as an admissions officer and an assistant dean of students, to the classroom of a public elementary school, where he had the privilege of teaching – and learning from – his fourth and fifth grade students. Steve has been a dorm director and associate dean of admissions at Wheelock College in Boston. He has also been an elementary school principal, a middle school principal, an assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, and, prior to his work at IHE, he was the superintendent of the Princeton Public Schools in Princeton, New Jersey where he was honored with the award of County Superintendent of the Year. In each of these roles, Steve has collaborated with others to prioritize innovations in learning, wellness for students, equity, and a belief that every child should be supported and inspired to achieve their highest potential.
Steve received his undergraduate degree in English from Princeton University and his master’s degree in educational administration from Harvard. He is a competitive road cyclist who also enjoys the thrill of mountain biking. Steve and his wife are both vegans and advocates for holistic health. They currently reside in Spencerport, New York, with their two dogs and a very large Maine Coon cat.
