HUMANE EDUCATION ADVOCATES REACHING TEACHERS

Programs

1. Teacher training, school consultation and student engagementheart's signature compassionate communities awards (cca) program has reached 36,000+ students in the past six years in new york and, starting in 2023, in chicago too, equipping young people with the knowledge, skills, and hope to create healthier, more resilient school neighborhoods for people, animals, and the environment. During the 2023-24 school year, our instructors provided guidance on creating programs that help make our food systems more equitable, humane, and sustainable. We worked closely with k-12 teachers at six nyc and chicago schools with a combined total student enrollment of 3,000+. In june, schools showcased accomplishments like developing urban gardens to harvest fresh edible produce and support pollinators and offering cooking classes and recipes that helped students (and their parents) prepare healthy meals. Heart offered all participating schools microgrants of up to $1,000 toward their efforts. The year-end celebration event for ps 135 in queens was attended by representatives of two of the city offices and programs we are partnering with to promote food sovereignty and support healthy food…

   $153,292 spent
   38% of program spending

2. 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. Heart was invited to participate in a plenary panel at the animal law conference in october at lewis & clark law school in portland discussing adolescents and animal cruelty. Heart illustrated how humane education can help mitigate animal cruelty and described our work in fostering empathy for animals.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. We also optimized our use of social media and posted blogs about our programs and activities. Among the key priorities that emerged in our strategic planning process was the need for a new organization name and rebrand. Our renaming and rebranding effort was a priority for our board and staff in 2024 and, having made significant progress during that…

   $144,911 spent
   36% of program spending

3. Educational resource development and distribution to make our vast array of resources in our website library more easily accessible for educators looking for specific content, we began developing mini-units by topic that link to relevant lessons from our numerous guides and toolkits, organized by grade bands. This year we created a climate change mini-unit to accompany our 2024 climate institute teacher training, as well as a companion animal mini-unit that can be used by any teacher in the u.s.we continued to promote and disseminate our six resource manuals: our k-12 food and climate guide with 11 lessons; 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…

   $69,861 spent
   17% of program spending

4. Student programsthrough two retired nyc schoolteachers we trained, 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. In spring and fall 2024, our instructors taught a total of approximately 300 nyc elementary and high school students. This fall, we also trained a new volunteer educator to provide additional direct instruction in nyc in 2025.in indianapolis, we regularly partner with the peace learning center and earth charter indiana to offer a successful climate camp every summer. To accommodate a growing number of campers and variety of interests, this summer we continued offering several weeklong specialty camps in addition to one week of our traditional climate camp as we did in 2023. Topics for the specialty camps included climate-friendly foods, public transit, strengthening mental health and resilience, effective communication techniques, creative expression, influencing climate policy, and connecting with nature. Offering these specialty camps in addition to our traditional climate camp allows us to…

   $37,767 spentof which $6,632 as grants$13,160 earned by the program
   9% of program spending

The 4 programs described on its FY2024 Form 990, listed largest first by expense. Program spending in total: $405,831.