Fast Facts

Founded: 1990

Type of Organization: IGE is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Visit Guidestar for more information.

Mission: To provide practical tools to build ethical fitness and cultures of integrity at home, at school, in the workplace, and in society.

Guiding Principles:

As an institution dedicated to the advancement of ethics, our core values establish and guide all we do. Our research suggests that five core ethical values are common to many cultures, regardless of race, age, religious affiliation, gender, or nationality. To live these values, we strive for ourselves and our clients always to be:

  • Honest and truthful in all our dealings
  • Responsible and accountable in every transaction
  • Fair and equitable in each relationship
  • Respectful and mindful of the dignity of every individual
  • Compassionate and caring in each situation

We also strive to operate with a global mindset, which includes understanding differences in how ethics manifest across cultures, seeing and learning from our common ground, and fostering relationships that can operate and succeed amidst differences and complexity.

Affiliations: In every sense of the word we are an independent organization. We have no political or religious affiliations. This independence is fundamental to our approach and allows us to work with people from all walks of life. Learn more about our approach to ethics.

Clients served: IGE serves clients in a variety of sectors including businesses, nonprofits, government, professional associations, schools K – Graduate level. Interested in learning more about our clients and how we serve them? Read a selection of our case studies.

Funding: As a non-profit institution dedicated to the advancement of ethics across all sectors it is imperative that we employ a blended funding strategy. Our funding primarily comes from foundation giving, individual philanthropic support, and income from our training and consulting services.

Locations: IGE is headquartered in Madison, WI and has offices in Camden, ME and New York City.

Hours of Operation: We hold regular business hours in each of our offices 9am – 5pm local time. Our staff is often on the move so don't be surprised if you receive an emailed response outside of normal business hours. Visit our staff page to obtain email addresses for our staff.

Trademarks: Building School Culture™, Ethical Fitness®, Ethical Literacy®, Ethics Newsline®, Institute for Global Ethics®, Moral Courage™, Tone-at-the-Top™.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • What do you do? IGE assists individuals and organizations of every kind providing training and consulting services to make ethics an integral part of daily life.
  • What do you mean by "ethics"? We use the term loosely, but generally explain it as the study of what is right or what is good. In our more than twenty years of doing research across the globe, we have discovered that while different people use different words to voice their values, the concepts nearly always can be distilled into a set of five or six shared values with a common subset: compassion, fairness, honesty, respect, and responsibility.
  • What is your position on…? As a nonpartisan organization, the Institute for Global Ethics deliberately does not take positions on political candidates, hot-button issues, and controversies of the moment. Instead, we focus our energies on helping people reason through the issues themselves, providing tools and frameworks to help parse the political, social, and moral debates underway. Our goal is not to tell people what to think, but to offer tools that help them with how to think through tough ethical issues.