Alethea Global Cooperative

Alethea Global Cooperative wins CANIE climate award for Best Global Education Provider! Alethea is a small, entirely women-run cooperative with no institutional backing. Alethea has three connected aspects of work that they focus on: measuring emissions, teaching practitioners, and bringing organisations together for sector collaboration. They specialize in the transformation of the international education sector from a climate justice lens by offering a variety of resources in Canada and around the world.

Alethea has produced the participant travel emissions inventory for CBIE's conference for four years running, and for The Forum on Education Abroad conference for the last two, including Nashville 2026. Nearly 4,700 conference attendees were prompted to report their travel method during registration. These results are then being used by both organisations when planning conferences and choosing locations to further reduce their environmental footprint. The real-world implications of their work are evident. By sharing these practices across the sector, Alethea is helping international education institutions better understand their climate impact and make informed decisions about reducing emissions by providing evidence. Alethea’s impacts have also been seen far and wide through its incredible offered courses. Its course, Foundations of Climate Justice and Internationalization, has trained 88 practitioners from 65 institutions in 9 countries. Participants reported their confidence in influencing their own organisation nearly doubled, from 4.4 to 7.2 out of 10. Climate education is imperative in the influence of making climate-friendly organisational decisions, which is what Alethea is making possible for institutions around the world. The story of their impact is compelling with the significant measured change in participants' confidence!

This sector-wide impact was reflected in judges' feedback as well, with one judge describing their work as having an “unusually strong sector-level impact for a small cooperative.” Alethea founded and leads the IE Conference Innovation Community of Practice. Its members, including CBIE, AIEA and The Forum, represent more than 1,000 institutions across the Americas. Through professional training, shared learning and partnerships with major associations, Alethea’s impact goes beyond individual engagements with clients, and onto the broader scale of the sector allowing for more wide scale progress. Another judge pointed to its multi-year emissions tracking and called it an evidence-based submission across all criteria. Alethea’s demonstration of measurement of carbon footprint, climate justice education, and institution collaboration aligns substantially with the goals of the CANIE Accord. CANIE celebrates how Alethea is helping to build up the sector's ability to make informed decisions using evidence and education on environmental sustainability. This cooperative’s achievements and ability to reach a community beyond its own size, is remarkable. Congratulations are in order to Alethea Global Cooperative!

Congratulations to Alethea Global Cooperative. Would your organisation like to join them as a CANIE Accord signatory?