Welcome to Generation Human Rights

Hello Generation Human Rights supporters,

I am Elana Haviv, the founder and Executive Director of Generation Human Rights (formerly the Children’s Movement for Creative Education). It is an exciting time for Generation Human Rights as we re-establish ourselves in New York City and work to bring a new and innovative human rights curriculum to high schools nationwide. As you may know, we began with creative education programs in the NYC schools in 1995 and incorporated as a non-profit in 1998. After several successful years teaching in city schools in the five boroughs, supported by funding from the NYC Department of Education and additional support from several foundations, we were  presented with an opportunity to take our programs overseas to post-war Bosnia. There, from 2002-2010, we provided reconciliation projects for youth who had been children on the opposite sides of their recent war. Working in Bosnia was an amazing experience for our entire team, and when we returned to NYC in 2010, we began to explore how the lessons learned in Bosnia might be applied to enabling youth to engage in human rights programs here in the United States.  This exploration is helping us to become a cutting edge human rights education organization.

Our approach to human rights curriculum design is unique and holistic, and comes at an crucial juncture when many states like New York are considering mandating human rights lesson plans in their high school curricula. Currently, 36 states have indicated that human rights education is part of their curricula, and five states (Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York) have developed mandates or resolutions to include human rights education. Despite this movement forward, there is not yet a standardized human rights curriculum or training available for teachers. Generation Human Rights will fill that gap. We have been developing and piloting a new program for the past five years: Telling History Project: Understanding the Past to Create the Future (THP).  THP provides experiential and academic learning materials for students, professional support and training for teachers, and resources in the schools. All lesson plans are congruent with the national common core learning standards.

THP has three components, to learn more click here.

We thank you for your support.

All best, Elana Haviv