The Institute for Humane Education (IHE) helps people understand and address the interconnected challenges facing humans, animals, and the environment. Through free resources, online courses, workshops, presentations, graduate programs, and a global community of practice, we equip people to create a more just, humane, and sustainable world.
Our mission: to educate people to create a world in which all humans, animals, and nature can thrive.
The world faces deeply interconnected challenges—injustice, environmental destruction, and persistent harm to people and animals. Most education and societal systems aren’t designed to address these issues.
Humane education equips people to understand systemic harms, think critically about them, and develop solutions that do the most good and least harm—for people, animals, and the environment.
The ripple effect from humane education is enormous. One humane educator can reach hundreds or thousands of people, who in turn spread what they’ve learned throughout their lives.
These numbers capture the drops that create ripples—the full story lives in the people carrying this work forward.
Click on the map to read stories about humane educators & solutionary projects around the world.
Israel
United States
East Africa (Kenya)
Training That Adapts Across Cultures & Curriculum
Since 2024, 10 cohorts of teachers across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania have learned how to use the Solutionary Framework to support students in addressing issues in their communities. We’ve partnered with Humane Education Sustainable Solutions (HESS) to offer in-person trainings to complement the online Solutionary Micro-credential Course and ensure training is culturally relevant and prepares educators to work with Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC).
Netherlands
France
Student-Led Changemaker Conference
Since 2022, groups of students at three international schools in Germany have taken on the responsibility of hosting a student-led Changemaker Conference. The conferences bring together students from six European countries, many of whom have used the Solutionary Framework to address SDG-related issues in their communities. The idea of supporting students to plan and run Changemaker Conferences came from Mike Johnston, an alum of the Humane Education Graduate Programs, and Solutionary Coach Kathryn Berkman. What their inspiration started in Munich, is now a growing, student-driven network of young changemakers across the continent.
Columbia
Slovakia
Argentina
Scaling Student-Led Solutions in Spanish
In a partnership with PrepaTec, a network of 34 International Baccalaureate high schools serving 30,000 students across Mexico, we trained more than 300 teachers, curriculum designers, and coaches to incorporate our Solutionary Framework into multiple disciplines.
By translating lesson plans and resources for using the Solutionary Framework into Spanish through this partnership, we are now able to support and train humane educators throughout Latin America.
Peru
Scotland
Ecuador
South Africa
Low Tech Learning with High Impact
In the rural community of Genadendal, a group of teachers who completed the Solutionary Micro-credential Course partnered with Greyton Farm Animal Sanctuary and created ring binders with IHE's printed humane education lesson plans and the Solutionary Guidebook. With these binders, 77 teachers across the valley are now bringing humane education and solutionary learning to their students, showing how entire communities can feel the impact from a few educators—even in areas with limited digital access.
Canada
Italy
Nigeria
Pakistan
Zimbabwe
Portugal
Uruguay
Jordan
Hungary
UAE
Uganda
Laos
Uzbekistan
Thailand
Taiwan
Bolivia
Chile
China
Cuba
Phillippines
Tanzania
Belgium
India
Panama
Costa Rica
Turkye
Syria
BeninCroatia
Cameroon
Benin
Senegal
UK
Gambia
Bangladesh
Vietnam
Ecuador
Nepal
Austria
Egypt
Georgia
Ghana
Zambia
Singapore
Albania
Malawi
Saudi Arabia
Lebanon
Malaysia
Lithuania
Indonesia
In Maine, more than 400 teachers across the state have completed the Solutionary Micro-credential Course and are using the Solutionary Framework to lead inquiry-to-action projects with their students. This is a result of the Maine Solutionaries Project, a collaboration between IHE and the Interdisciplinary Instruction Team at the Maine Department of Education.
Maine is also home to the IHE campus, where many humane education graduate students have experienced transformative learning and connection at a brief on-campus residency.
Solutionary Guidebook Sparks a Summit
After discovering IHE's free Solutionary Guidebook, teachers in several Colorado school districts began integrating solutionary learning into their classrooms—including one teacher at Evergreen Middle School who now hosts an annual Solutionary Summit. IHE's reach in Colorado extends beyond K-12: a graduate program alum serves as Executive Director of Luvin' Arms Animal Sanctuary in Erie, bringing humane education deeply into the community.
Degrees of Change
Through our partnership with Antioch University New England, IHE offers accredited graduate programs that are training the next generation of leaders in humane education. While our MA, MEd, and Certificate programs are offered entirely online, this campus is the hub that supports our faculty and confers degrees that carry real weight in the field. Graduates go on to lead humane education efforts in schools, sanctuaries, and organizations across the country and around the world.
Inspiring Districts and Dissertations
After reading Zoe Weil's book, The World Becomes What We Teach, environmental and STEM education coordinators in San Mateo County coalesced around the solutionary approach, which influenced the design of their fellowship program. Their work has since spread to surrounding counties and districts.
That same spirit of expanding impact is alive at Antioch University Los Angeles, our partner for the growing EdD program specializing in Humane Education. The affiliated doctoral students are contributing valuable research into the field that educators around the world will be able to draw from.
Côte d'Ivoire
Most Good, Least Harm Student Club
In Côte d'Ivoire, humane education is taking root through the work of Toti Yale, who attended IHE's Summer Residency in Maine and brought the MOGO—Most Good, Least Harm—principle back to his students. The MOGO club he founded empowers young people to become agents of change, and has already produced tree-planting projects, plastic and waste awareness initiatives, and animal care campaigns.
The Institute for Humane Education is the global leader in comprehensive humane education. We help people understand, teach about, and address systemic challenges in ways that do the most good and the least harm for people, animals, and the environment
Education shapes how people see the world, and how they act in it. Every teacher we train, every student who engages in a solutionary project, every graduate who carries this work into their community is part of building something larger. With your help, we’re growing that circle.
“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.
