This book chapter argues that HRE advocates in the USA should recognize the limitations blunting their efforts to integrate HRE within the formal K-12 and post-secondary education systems and direct more of their efforts to working with popular democratic movements and organizations outside of that institutional framework. While popular education faces challenges of its own (See Mayo and Ranford, European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults 14:97–108, 2023), particularly the orientation of many adult education and other popular education initiatives to focus on learning and/or training for the labor market rather than sustaining a focus on emancipatory pedagogies that challenge structures of oppression, popular education has great potential to be a vital avenue for human rights education’s expansion and impact.