This activity encourages students to discover and think about the perspectives of other people and of nonhuman animals using a brief video featuring a mouse and a zucchini on a kitchen counter.
Recommended grades: K-5
Time: 30 minutes
global solutions
What Will You Say?
At the end of your very long life, a child asks you what you did to help make the world so much better. Guide students through this visualization to help them get in touch with their power to make positive change.
Recommended grades: 6 and up
Time: 10-20 minutes
Power Chat
What are the problems of the world? What tools and skills do I have to make a positive impact? This activity can serve as a good icebreaker to allow fellow advocates to know each other better and to focus on important issues, or it can serve as an introduction for exploring what each (and all) of us can do for positive social change.
Recommended grades: 6 and up
Time: 30 minutes or more
Urgency and Opportunity: Preparing a Generation of Solutionaries 
(A Call to Action by Steve Cochrane, Executive Director of the Institute for Humane Education) Over the past two years, life as we know it has changed. We have seen the entire world impacted by disease. We are watching the atrocities of war through our daily news feeds. We are facing a climate crisis, a crisis…
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Paul K. Chappell: Solutionary Spotlight
Introduction: Paul K. Chappell is an international peace educator, author, and founder of Peace Literacy. He graduated from West Point, was deployed to Iraq, and left active duty as a Captain. Realizing that humanity is facing new challenges that require us to become as well-trained in waging peace as soldiers are in waging war, Chappell…
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Be a Force for Good for Ukraine
I am a humane educator, someone who teaches about the cruelties, destruction, and injustices we perpetrate on other humans, animals, and the environment and who helps people cultivate compassion and integrity and become solutionaries able and motivated to build humane, healthy, and just societal systems. It is in this capacity – rather than as an expert in geopolitics or…
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Don’t Pit People Against Animals
On January 5, 2022, Pope Francis spoke in Rome and described people who have pets instead of children as selfish. He went on to say that pet keeping was “a denial of fatherhood and motherhood and diminishes us, takes away our humanity.” There’s so much that is wrong about his statement. 1. Spoken by someone who himself chose not…
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Less work, more time to be a solutionary: An Interview with Veronika Perková
Veronika Perková is a Czech environmental journalist with bylines in BBC, Mongabay, and Earth Island Journal. She hosts a monthly, solutions-focused podcast, Nature Solutionaries, which tackles conservation and population issues. She is also the author of Ask Great Questions, Get Great Answers; a university lecturer on interviewing; and a wildlife illustrator. Zoe Weil: You’re a…
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Schools are becoming an epicenter of culture wars, but there is a solution to the conflicts
School board members are receiving death threats. School board meetings have become shouting matches. The national news is regularly reporting about the most local of politics—school board elections in tiny districts. The two primary topics causing all this conflict are COVID-based mandates for masking and/or vaccination and teaching about racism in social studies classes. This post is about…
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Be a Solutionary, Make a Difference, and Find Meaning in Your Life
When I observe our dogs, I often envy their seeming ease in the world. Sure, Pippin gets anxious when we leave the house (and the couch cover gets a wee bit more torn up as a result); Poppy cringes when treats are tossed her way (perhaps because she was abused before we rescued her); and Hershel has a pillow…
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