Assessment Institute: Aligning higher education community engagement with the Sustainable Development Goals
Join us at the 2021 Assessment Institute!
Aligning higher education community engagement with the Sustainable Development Goals
17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030. The SDGs framework provides the benefit of standardized language and common indicators, which can be used to help stakeholders across all disciplines and sectors speak the same language and make progress toward shared impact. Community engagement administrators are uniquely positioned to help integrate the SDGs into strategic institutional initiatives. Our workshop will provide participants with an overview of the SDGs, an overview of higher education community engagement, and concrete tools to link the two frameworks together.
One critique of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is that there is a disconnect between the articulation of global goals and the coordination of localized efforts that can directly contribute to those goals. As a result, higher education and other entities in the United States have been slow to adopt the international framework. This workshop will introduce participants to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and metrics through a community-university partnership lens. We suggest that by understanding community-university partnerships in the context of the SDGs, higher education institutions can respond at the local level with clear evidence of how their existing work already supports the 17 global goals.
Participants will have the opportunity to explore how the SDGs connect to higher education mission and vision, how they can manifest across campus, and how they can be incorporated into community engagement initiatives at their institutions. In the final portion of this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to align their university’s community engagement and commitments to impact with the UN SDGs using a first-of-its-kind resource guide and toolkit.
Speakers
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Jessica GivensSDGs & Beyond Task Force Coordinator at Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory
Jessica Givens is the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) & Beyond Task Force Coordinator at Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory co-chaired by the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Based in the largest and most innovative university in the country, Jessica co-creates strategy and execution of projects related to the SDGs with an emphasis on driving tech-based green growth which scales now and beyond 2030. Jessica holds a Bachelor of Science in Conservation Biology & Ecology and Master of Science & Technology Policy from Arizona State University.