Program areas at HEART
Teacher training, school consultation and student engagementheart's signature compassionate communities awards (cca) program, which has attracted participation from 55 new york elementary schools collectively serving 34,000+ students, was introduced in 2023 in three chicago schools, Reaching over 1,500 students, in a new format to create a more level playing field where participating schools received cash awards of equal value ($1,000 each) to support their students' projects. The theme of our cca program was food justice for all. Heart provided hands-on consultations with Teachers at each school and offered relevant curricular materials covering all aspects of food justice to help students in developing impactful service projects. In the 2023-24 school year, we are returning to new york and chicago with our evolved cca program to enhance youth leadership and encourage school participation from historically marginalized communities.we developed a 2-credit 30-hour professional development course, "solidarity not charity: an equity approach to bringing sel into service-learning goals and practices," which was approved by nyc public schools (nycps) as a credit-bearing module that qualifies schoolteachers toward a salary differential. We offered the course in spring 2023 and subsequently expanded it into a 3-credit 45-hour course, which was approved by the nycps for the 2023-24 school year. We also had Teachers at eight chicago public schools take two of our on-demand virtual trainings on teaching community and conflict resolution skills in the classroom.heart was selected as one of about 45 food Education vendors approved by the nyc mayor's office and nycps to offer its services to schools across nyc. We are working on developing several courses for nyc public school Teachers on food justice that examine food systems and their environmental impact as well as their effects on people and animals. In 2023, heart developed Humane Education lessons, activity guides, and a virtual training for paw bvi, a nonprofit organization in the british virgin islands that works to end homelessness for dogs and cats. Through this project, we are assisting paw bvi in its efforts to bring Humane Education content to local youth organizations and schools to promote healthy relationships between people, animals, and the planet. Heart was part of a conference sponsored by fordham university's center for community engaged learning that highlighted ways that Humane Education has a meaningful place in catholic Education with valuable discussion surrounding the challenges educators, parents, and supporters of animal welfare face in teaching compassion to children. We also offered a workshop on the intersections of social justice with Humane Education for students at canisius college.
Educational resource development and distribution in 2023, we developed two food and climate guides that offer Teachers an in-depth tool to teach students how our food system is related to the climate crisis. One tool is teacher-led and another can be used independently by students. We continued to promote and disseminate our five resource manuals: our k-5 and secondary school justice for all guides, totaling 49 lessons; our k-12 Humane Education resource guide, with 40 animal protection lessons; our k-3 exploring the lives of farm animals guide with 14 lessons; and our pre-k guide, kindness for all, with a 7-lesson curriculum. We also promoted our remote learning collection of activities as well as our teachclimate.org climate literacy website, and we disseminated our everyday circles cards, a toolkit of 180 Humane education/social and emotional learning activity cards pertaining to a range of animal, environmental, and social justice topics.
Marketing, social media, and advocacy a key component of our advocacy efforts to promote Humane Education and improve compliance with the new york state Humane Education law was raising awareness of the many benefits that Humane Education offers and providing free access to our teaching resources across a variety of web-based platforms. We submitted an article on Humane Education to be published in the new elgar concise encyclopedia of animal law. This reference work will be a vital tool for researchers, law practitioners, and students for years to come. We continued to market heart's resources to gain as wide an audience for our materials as possible and to contract with a service to manage our google ad grant, the leading source of our website traffic. In 2023, heart was honored to be named "best Humane Education website for inspiration" through the association of professional Humane educators' best of 2022 competition where thousands of people voted. We also optimized our use of social media and posted blogs about our programs and activities.heart continued working with the weareteachers brand of mdr -- a division of dun & bradstreet with a highly engaged nationwide audience of educators across all grade levels -- to promote a thought leadership article focused on activities to teach kindness to children at the pre-k - 1st grade level. The article was directed to approximately 50,000 mdr contacts in the early childhood Education space, largely in the nyc and la areas, and was active from august 2022-august 2023. Our goals with this campaign were to build awareness of heart as a teaching resource among early childhood educators, encourage educators to download our kindness for all guide for preschool Teachers, and generate leads for heart. It was a very successful campaign, with over 28,000 pageviews and nearly 1,000 downloads of the guide and new subscribers to heart's listserv.heart was accepted as a partner in a competitive accelerator program run by nyc-based venture philanthropy initiative youth inc, which specializes in building the capacity of nyc-focused youth development nonprofits through an array of cohort-based pro bono technical assistance programs and consultations with individual organizations. Heart participated in youth inc's agile strategic planning lab program, which resulted in distilling our organizational objectives and priorities over the next 3 years (2024-2026) into a strategic plan. We also hired a marketing firm to begin a rebranding effort arising from the strategic plan.
Student programs through two volunteer retired nyc schoolteachers we trained, one of whom we hired in september, we have been teaching in-person at queens and brooklyn public schools to provide multi-lesson instruction that equips students with knowledge and strategies to make meaningful change for animals, people, and the environment. Through our instructors' efforts, we taught over 440 3rd-10th grade students at ps 234 in queens, and abraham lincoln high school and edward r. murrow high school in brooklyn. We regularly partner with the peace learning center in indianapolis and earth charter Indiana to offer a successful week-long climate camp every summer. In summer 2023, to accommodate an increased number of new and returning campers, several weeklong specialty camps were offered in addition to one week of our traditional climate camp, Reaching over 50 young people. We offered our very first food-based camp where students learned about our food system and had hands-on practice preparing entirely plant-based meals for the entire camp. Other topics for the specialty camps included art, policy, gardens, and public transit. In indianapolis, we also conducted tours for student groups at our be the change Humane Education museum with peace learning center in eagle creek state park.