hreusa

This year’s toolkit is packed with ready-to-use, SDG skills resources to help you:

• Bring the Global Goals into your teaching in new ways 
• Explore timely topics like global trade, supply chains and peace-building
• Foster peace, empathy, and hope in the classroom

“Systems Bingo!” explores how global trade connects us all – and why it’s crucial to make these systems fair and sustainable for both people and planet. Fast-paced discussion, plus a bit of healthy competition! 

“Be Hope” invites students to imagine a brighter future and share their visions with the world on the Map of Hope, to be hope for others.  

“SDG 16 in Action” demonstrates how peace-building can begin in the classroom, through empathy, fairness and creative collaboration.

>> Access resource

Asha Rangappa is a Yale professor and former FBI agent who appears frequently on national media as a legal and security analyst.

Prior to her current position as Senior Lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs, Rangappa was Associate Dean at Yale Law School and served as a Special Agent in the New York Division of the FBI, specializing in counterintelligence investigations. Rangappa has been a legal and national security analyst for CNN and ABC News, and has also appeared frequently on MSNBC and BBC. She is an editor for Just Security, a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, and a Security Fellow with the Truman National Security Project. At Yale, Rangappa teaches courses on national security law, Russian information warfare, and leadership and ethics. She is the author of The Freedom Academy, a bestselling online Substack publication about disinformation and its impact on democracy, and she also co-hosts the legal podcast, It’s Complicated, with Renato Mariotti.

Noting that “Rangappa’s humor and intellect have won her a formidable following,” a recent magazine profile stated, “If you could invent a political commentator with bipartisan credibility, she might look like Asha Rangappa. . . . Rangappa knows from experience how the FBI handles Russian spies and disinformation; add to the mix her professorial skill at explaining complex ideas, and she is ideally positioned to break down the bewildering political events of recent years.”

Sep 18, 2025, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM (CT), The Mauthe Center, 2418 Leon Bond Dr, Green Bay, WI 54311 and Webinar 


This event is free and open to the public. Registration here will reserve your seat until 6:45pm.

>> Learn more and register 
>> The event will also be simulcast as a webinar. To attend virtually, follow this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_IGUM7OChR1Gb7aRW435QMA

HRE USA is a coalition of hundreds of members across the country, and we continue to grow daily. We are academics, activists, parents, educators, students, unions, policy makers, social scientists, software engineers, professors, artists, and non-profit organizations united with a common mission: promoting human dignity, justice, and peace by cultivating an expansive, vibrant base of support for human rights education (HRE) within the United States.

There are two ways to join the HRE USA community: as an individual or as an organization.

>> Learn more and become a member today! 

Assemblies—gatherings where large numbers of people come together to deliberate and make collective decisions—are a powerful tool for democratic governance and movement-building. As the U.S. and countries around the world struggle to meet people’s material needs, reduce extreme concentrations of wealth and defeat right-wing racist and xenophobic authoritarian threats, assemblies and other models of collaborative governance hold potential to help reverse the tide. In this webinar, we’ll talk with Ben Palmquist, author of a new report on assemblies, about how different forms of assemblies including people’s movement assemblies and civic assemblies are reshaping governance across the U.S. and around the world. And we’ll hear from Just Futures in Washington State and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition about how they’re using assemblies and building community-government collaboration to support community-led visioning and power-building for equity and justice for all.

Featured speakers:

• Kesi Foster, Co-Executive Director, Partners for Dignity & Rights (moderator)
• Evan Casper–Futterman, Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition
• Katherine Mella, Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition
• Esther Min, Front and Centered
• Lindsay Morgan Tracy, Washington Economic Justice Alliance, Washington State Department of Social and Health Services
• Ben Palmquist, Partners for Dignity & Rights, New Social Contract

Tuesday, September 9, 2025, 9am PT / 12pm ET / 6pm CET, virtual (available in English with Spanish interpretation)

>> Register

Thursday, October 23, 2025, starting at 12noon, at the Church Center of the United Nations, 777 United Nations Plaza, in New York, NY. Lunch will be served. 
The event will also be livestreamed for those who wish to view from afar.

The Fourth Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the United States has been set to take place in November 2025. The UPR is a unique United Nations Human Rights Council process that allows all United Nations Member States to undergo a peer review of their human rights records every 4.5 years. So far this year, the United States government is refusing to participate in this process. Nonetheless, U.S. civil society will mobilize to ensure that people’s voices are heard through important testimonies to build a record toward addressing human rights violations here in the United States. As part of those efforts to build a record, a People’s UPR is being organized as a side event during the Third Committee Session at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, NY.  We hope that the People’s UPR will be attended by United Nations, Country Mission, and Embassy staffers both in NY and in Geneva (via zoom).

There will be opportunities for directly impacted persons (a ‘directly impacted person’ is someone who is personally and directly affected by the law, policy, practice, act or omission by the government) to testify in-person during the People’s UPR regarding human rights issues in the United States. The event will be livestreamed but there will be no opportunities for persons to testify live via the web. Instead, we will play prerecorded testimony received via video ahead of time from persons who cannot attend in-person.

Tentative Schedule for People’s UPR:

12-2pm Testimony from Directly Impacted Persons 

2-3pm Q&A

4pm Press Conference

>> Sign up here to receive information regarding the People’s UPR as it is available.

Visit this page to get up to date on the latest HRE USA news.

See past issues of the newsletter here.

We are pleased to announce the availability of our latest installment of podcast episodes in Human Rights Education NOW! Episodes 62 & 63 feature conversations with Zeynep Karatas, Eugenia Ricciotti, and Tata Varadashvili.

Zeynep Karatas

Zeynep Karatas is a recent graduate of University of California – Irvine (UCI), where she studied Political Science and International Studies in the honors program. She gained experience with several international human rights organizations, including The Borgen Project, Lawyers Without Borders, the United Nations Association of the USA, and The Advocates for Human Rights. On campus, she held multiple leadership roles in student government, teaching, and event planning. Her honors thesis on the European Court of Human Rights examined the protection of rights amid democratic erosion, presented at three conferences. Recognized with awards such as UCI’s Outstanding Undergraduate Award, the Phi Beta Kappa Graduate Study Award, and the Order of Merit, she aspires to pursue graduate school and a career in international human rights law.

Eugenia Ricciotti

Eugenia Ricciotti is a law graduate from the University of Trento, Italy, currently pursuing a Master’s in Human Rights and Sustainability at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She previously interned with The Advocates for Human Rights, contributing to advocacy campaigns, women’s rights initiatives, and the Beijing+30 project, which documents the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women. With interests in minority rights and gender equality, she hopes to build a career as a researcher and advocate in human rights.

Tata Varadashvili

Tata Varadashvili, based in Vienna, Austria, is a graduate of Central European University with a degree in Political, Legal, and Governmental Studies and will soon begin her LL.M. in Human Rights. She has served as First Vice Chair of the Student Union and participated in numerous human rights initiatives during her studies. Currently interning with the WAVE Network, she aims to pursue a career specializing in women’s rights and international criminal law.

Thank you for supporting the Human Rights Education NOW! podcast!