Some of our achievements in the past five years include:

Rights Sites: Since January 2002, Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights has partnered with a group of six metro-area schools that are committed to long-term integration of human rights education (HRE) into their curriculum.  We established "Rights Sites" (schools with multiple staff, teachers, and administrators committed to developing human rights education within their school curricula) in these elementary, middle, and high schools.  Each academic year, we document the human rights activities, lessons, and events at each of these schools and interview the teachers, administrators, and students involved in the project.  We then organize and publish the information on our website to serve as a resource for teachers and students.  Click here to see the results of this project.

Educator Trainings/Workshops:
"Bridging Classroom, Curriculum, and Community" - October 2002- February 2004

Thirty-five Minnesota K-12 teachers and community educators participated in this interactive 4-part course over the past two years.  The workshop series has highlighted a framework for addressing and teaching about international and local issues that affect today's multicultural school environment. The series brought together local human rights organizations and educators to develop participants' understanding of human rights, culture, and peace education and give them content and tools to apply these principles in the classroom.  The workshop series was developed in conjunction with other members of the Minnesota Global, Peace, and Human Rights Education Network.  Because of the success of the initiative, our network plans to offer the workshop series again next fall and continue to help foster collaboration between the teacher participants. 

November 2003: “I Am, I Can, I Will: Arts and Activism”: In this partnership with the 5-Distrcit Integration Partnership of the Twin Cities east metro, a group of 85 middle school students participated in a day-long event to learn about each other, their communities, their power and responsibilities to make change.  Staff from Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights led students in fun activities related to human rights in the morning. In the afternoon, four artists from Intermedia Arts continued to explore human rights issues through spoken word, song, dance, and visual arts projects.  The main goal of the ongoing partnership is for students to increase awareness and skills around issues of race and culture. Click here for links to photos from the event.

Curriculum: In 2001, we created Survival: Every Child's Right, an interdisciplinary, math-and-science skill building curriculum based on Minnesota Advocates' fact-finding research on child survival in Uganda, Mexico, and the United States.  This curriculum project will be accessible on our website in Mid-November 2002 .

In 1997 we published Good Things Happen when Students Take Action, a collection of curriculum materials designed to support and foment positive youth action on human rights issues.  This curriculum will also be available online soon.

2000 Youth Conference on Refugee and Immigrant Issues: On December 9, 2000, we hosted "Mirrors and Prisms: How we Reflect and Represent the New Minnesota", Minnesota Advocates' 2000 Youth Conference on Refugee and Immigrant Issues.  The conference brought together enthusiastic teenagers from throughout Minnesota. Follow-up activities include a youth website, arts journal and video production.

"Human Rights Education for Community Change" initiative (2000-02): This outreach initiative provided services for Greater MN communities experiencing changes in their population's ethnic and socioeconomic diversity.  The work included organizing regional meetings, conducting trainings, fact-finding and consultative work with schools, businesses, and social agencies who invite us to assist them in examining their community's human rights culture.