Regenerating Education
A Note From Our Founder
Dear friends,
I’m İpek Kıraç, founder of Regenerating Education and the Futures Institute network. My path—from studying biology and public health at Brown University to leading educational initiatives that center human flourishing—has always been guided by one belief: education holds the power to heal and reimagine our shared future.
Across the world, young people are losing trust in the systems meant to help them grow. They feel disconnected from themselves, from one another, and from the living world around them. Traditional education continues to reward performance over purpose, compliance over curiosity. Yet, we know from science and experience that learning blossoms when it’s rooted in belonging, purpose, and connection.
The Futures Institute was created to help young people rediscover their agency—to learn how to think critically, feel deeply, and act courageously. Through partnerships with thinkers and institutions like Harvard’s Project Zero, we explore how neuroscience, hope, and design can unite to cultivate learning that restores both people and planet.
We are building a global network of institutes and communities that share core principles: science-grounded pedagogy, embodied learning, authentic partnerships, and a commitment to equity and collective liberation. Each community adapts these ideas to its own context, culture, and imagination.
The crises we face—climate breakdown, social division, loss of meaning—are daunting. But the next generation is ready to meet them with empathy, creativity, and courage. They are learning to listen before designing, to collaborate rather than compete, to build not from fear, but from love.
This is the future we are already shaping together. Join us. Support this movement to regenerate education—and in doing so, to nurture a more connected and living world.
With hope and solidarity,
İpek Kıraç
Founder, Regenerating Education & Futures Institute
“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about the training and ‘success’, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”
- Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Regenerating Education
Regenerating Education is an interdisciplinary design studio creating learning environments that can meet the world’s greatest challenges. We are designing the Futures Institute as a living embodiment of this work and are building a global coalition of partners committed to renewing human society and our planet.
Our starting point is simple: education should restore its deeper moral purpose.
Our North Star
We advance the right of every person to learn as a practice of healing and becoming— cultivating love, renewing human vitality, fostering planetary flourishing, and rooting all in justice.
Welcome to the Futures Institute
“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.”
- Hannah Ardent, “The Crisis in Education”
What is the Futures Institute?
The Futures Institute is where young people learn to restore broken systems, ecological and social, by learning how living systems work through regeneration, emergence, and adaptation. Our practice moves young people from fear to courage, suffering to compassion, and oppression to liberation through direct experience. We question foundations, travel to witness crisis and resilience, build with hands and tools, design solutions with communities facing injustice, sit with grief, and practice hope as strategy.
Our Learning Framework is grounded in five bodies of research: Behavioral Science, Cognitive Science, Hope Theory, Embodied Cognition, and Neuroscience.
Six-Week Summer Accelerator
An immersive lab exploring transformation across five interconnected fields, each week centers on one core pillar while drawing insight from the others, forming an applied “science of becoming.”
Over 42 days, they move through an arc of disruption, crisis, embodiment, agency, solidarity, and integration. Through cycles of cognitive, emotional, and physical stress and repair, they practice regulation, reflection, and rest within a supportive community. Daily rituals—meditation, journaling, creative curation—evolve into anchored habits. Participants learn and rewire how they engage with crisis, agency, and community.
In partnership with Harvard Project Zero, the Futures Institute conducts participatory research— evolving alongside its participants, guided by continuous feedback, data analysis, and real-time learning.
Welcome to The Sanctuary
