Please Support our CIRI Human Rights Education Initiative

Starting this fall with the release of our soon-to-be-announced web features, CIRI will be beginning a series of human rights-education initiatives. For the first of these endeavors, we are attempting funding via crowd-sourcing. 

If you are able to contribute, or know anyone that can, we'd certainly appreciate your support. If this initial project succeeds, we have a host of exciting further ideas for promoting human rights education in high schools.

A campaign abstract is below. You can contribute via Paypal or other means at our crowd-sourcing website: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ciri-human-rights-education-initiative/x/3817227

For your contribution, you can probably receive some free CIRI swag, maybe immortality on our website, but most-definitely our eternal thanks and the knowledge of doing some good by raising knowledge/awareness of human rights!

Summary of Campaign

The goal of the CIRI Human Rights Education Initiative is to produce human rights-based lesson plans for use in high school classrooms. Funds will be used to pay an advanced Ph.D. student to work with high school social science teachers under the supervision of CIRI Co-Director Dr. David L. Richards to develop human rights-based lesson plans during the summer of 2014.These lesson plans will be made freely available on the CIRI website.
The lesson plans will engage students with questions such as:

• What are human rights?
• Which human rights are most-respected and/or violated by governments around the world, and why?
• How can we compare countries' respect for human rights both across geography and over time?
• What can be done to better-protect human rights?
• What is the state of human rights in the USA?

By using CIRI data to address many of these questions, students will also learn and hone crucial evidence-based/critical thinking as well as quantitative-based comparative and comprehension skills.

What We Need & What You Get

Our campaign total is based on: (1) the cost of a half-time graduate research assistant for one summer (77% of total funds requested for campaign); (2) expenses related to working with high school teachers on lesson creation; (3) web-based distribution costs; (3) miscellaneous supplies.

The Impact

The goal of the CIRI project is greater respect for human rights fueled by greater awareness of human rights, and we can't think of a better starting point than the high school classroom. Human rights education has come a long way at colleges -- to the point where it is now a major of its own. However, human rights on its own is just a budding subject in high schools. By combining a data-based approach with human rights education, the CIRI Initiative's lesson plans will meet dual needs: topical coverage of human rights and an introduction to quantitative comparison/analysis and evidence-based decision making.