humanebeings

My husband has a high-powered magnifying glass which he’s put on a string to wear around his neck. Mostly, he forgets about it, and it’s come out quite seldom in the past few years. When we were heading to Newfoundland last month, I asked him to make sure to bring it. For some reason I always forget the term “magnifying glass,” and as I’ve struggled to recall it, I’ve begun referring to it as the “microglass.” I was the one who mostly wore the microglass in Newfoundland, and on my birthday in July, my husband handed me a small gift wrapped in a Newfoundland brochure. It was the microglass.

So now it’s mine, and I have a few things to say about it. First, this was a great gift, and choosing great gifts for people who don’t need any more things, who try to live by the MOGO (most good, least harm) principle, who don’t want to contribute to waste, etc., can be tricky. How perfect that my husband passed on something already part of our household that I loved so much.   Read more...

Kim Korona is a graduate of our M.Ed. program at the Institute for Humane Education and a friend and colleague. Kim doesn’t usually like to make waves. She’s so kind and caring and avoids conflict with people assiduously. But she’s also a changemaker and a humane educator. This fall she moved to Brooklyn, New York, to be a humane educator for HEART, offering humane education programs to schools throughout the city. She moved into an apartment that had a host of problems, from smoke and a build up of soot from an improperly functioning boiler, to lack of fire and carbon monoxide alarms. She brought up the problems with her landlord, to no avail. Kim had some concerns about her own health, but when she also began to learn about the problems her neighbors were having, which included severe symptoms ranging from headaches and migraines, to nose burns, excessive coughing, black mucus, and sore throats, Kim took action. She contacted her neighbors, co-wrote a stern but honest petition to the management for them to sign, and launched change. The problems have been fixed.   Read more...

When I was a child, my father would come into my room most mornings and ask me to choose which tie he should wear with the suit he had on that day. He usually brought two ties into my room from which I could choose. As I got older, sometimes I felt that neither choice was ideal, and I’d head over to his tie rack to suggest a better option. I adored my dad, and I took my job helping him with his ties quite seriously.

As a humane educator, my job now includes offering other people choices, although the choices revolve around more pressing issues than tie fashions.   Read more...

October is Fair Trade Month, designed to educate others about the importance of fair trade and encourage them to buy fair trade products.

The goal of fair trade is to empower producers in developing countries, advocate for a fair price for their goods, and to establish social and environmental standards for the production of those goods. (Find out more from Wikipedia:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade).   Read more...

I’m not an economist, but I, like many Americans, have been trying to understand and develop a cogent opinion about the economic crisis we are facing. A $700 billion dollar taxpayer bailout of Wall Street investment firms doesn’t sit well, although I’m convinced that speedy action is necessary to avert economic collapse. During the great depression, President Roosevelt offered the United States a new deal; he did not bail out Wall Street.

Our country’s infrastructure is in shambles. We face a desperate need to develop clean, viable energy sources. We need more schools and more humane educators so that classes are reasonably-sized, and students receive the education that will help them become citizen problem-solvers. We need more farmers producing food in a sustainable and organic manner. And people need jobs in order to pay their mortgages.   Read more...

More than 1 billion people live on $1 or less a day. Christopher Greenslate, M.Ed. graduate of the Institute for Humane Education (www.humaneeducation.org) and his partner Kerri -- both social studies teachers -- have embarked on a project to each eat on a food budget of $1/day. As they say in their first post:

"When we first started talking about doing this, we didn’t really have an agenda, or any developed sense of why we wanted to do it. It just seemed like an interesting challenge; one that would force us to see things differently.   Read more...