#LearningSociety Session Narrative: SDG Innovation & Partnership Building
On May 26, 2020 members of the Learning Society attended a session on Innovation & Partnership Building hosted by the Institute for Evolutionary Leadership. Participants from Japan, Kenya, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Sweden, Uganda, and other countries discussed their experiences and reflections on partnership building and innovation to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Participants’ reflections were recorded and processed into a report using a process inspired by the Collective Narrative Methodology. Related ideas were clustered together. Every idea mentioned in this report can be traced to the original recording. Words and linguistic structures used by the participants were kept in tact wherever possible while ensuring text readibility within the constraints of the quality of the recording.
SESSION NARRATIVE
The issues we discussed today are very important all over the world and we need to start thinking about how we can collaborate. We come from different countries, from different cultures, but we have similar interests and work with similar things which holds a really great opportunity for collaborative learning. There are many different kinds of initiatives, and it is important that we work together in one way or another, because we might not be able to reach our aims if we are working alone.
Working together gives us leverage: if we have one initiative in Sweden, it might not be so easy to change big things, but if we come together with, let us say, 150 initiatives and try to coordinate our work towards common goals that we want to accomplish, it will give us a powerful leverage.
It could be very important for whatever project we have to be connected to an international network. This allows us to discuss what might help us locally and regionally, to share our results with the world and it is important to be able to match related initiatives. It is important that we understand policies, work on partnerships, and use collaborative learning to take effective action and have impact at our local or regional level. If many organizations are connected — like in this network — we can work together in the same dimension to become more powerful which would result in more change.
Regional population pressure and struggles with securing access to quality education create urgency for collaboration without borders
Some of us brought insights and reflections from earlier sessions including those on the impact of the population size. For example, when we talk about Africa that has a population of slightly past one billion or Asia where this number is even bigger, we need to understand that the population size should be factored into the push and the pull for safe and sustainable cities where decisions are made and discussions go on. This is probably not what Africa is discussing at a deep enough level. We need to know how this affects the Sustainable Development Goals and their realisation. Unless there is a very concerted effort to be able to look at people, policies, and populations and how this so-called “Developing World” comes on board and really champions this, then it is going to be a very big challenge.
Those of us who work on the Sustainable Development Goal #4 (quality education) shared that about three million children globally are currently out of school and by 2030 it is estimated that one million children will still be out of school. We discussed how we could achieve SDG#4 when these statistics are so alarming and it was clear for us that it is time to collaborate, it is time to bring the best of the solutions that are available, it is time that we show that what happens in one country is hopping to another and that we can make kids have a different experience because somebody is providing the right solution that can change the future of another person.
There is an opportunity to create learning projects that will work differently from our existing institutions but it is difficult to fund these projects
There is also an opportunity to serve a lot of students that do not know how and with what they are going to work in this time of COVID-19 so we could tap into our resources and leapfrog to new learning society projects by finding different ways to facilitate learning.
One of the projects that we discussed that aligns with the timing of Burning Man and the UN General Assembly in September is the SDG SmART Cities Network. There is a conversation with the cities of Reno and Rio de Janeiro right now about using smart city technology art as an engagement mechanism and the SDGs as a call to purposeful action. Right during the session some participants agreed to explore a collaboration with the city of Trondheim in the context of that project, specifically linking a local university with the University of Nevada at Reno as a starting point.
Another example is a university in the Netherlands that is trying out organizing a multi-organizational summer school from June to August with whatever people feel like the world needs right now. That might sound very airy-fairy, but they have got a summer camp planned for July to teach emerging technologies under the banner of “Learning Man”, i.e., rhyming with “Burning Man”. There is a link with the World Economic Forum and their nine technologies, with permaculture, with some personal development methodologies that people are going to need.
There is always the challenge of financing all kinds of learning projects. Many do not see the great need to do new types of education and learning when we have many organizations, institutions, and nations that have their own programs that have been working for many hundreds of years. However, a better world does not have to look like the traditional institutions so these learning projects are not going to look like the traditional institutions either and it all does not have to fit into one container either. Instead it can just be a network of activities and organizations that are working in alignment to bring knowledge to the world.
Coordinating learning across different projects is challenging but modern technology can enable local organizations to connect their community to global knowledge networks
Another challenge of having all kinds of learning projects, including the Learning Society, is to coordinate them. How can we have people travelling all over the world — digitally for now but also physically in the future — and coordinating all kinds of learning projects so that learning is happening across these projects as well?
We appreciate that technology is really making us all get united in real time. We are able to share and collaborate in real time and it is very good to have such an opportunity. And we prayed that as we continue moving forward, that we will be involved and engaged even in the local communities so that somebody who has never left the borders of Kenya can still be able to be proud that they know the Sustainable Development Goals and they are championing these goals at their own level. The involvement of grassroots communities is a very key thing that we want to facilitate and to make sure that community hubs like the Stumcode Hub in Nairobi can bring this discussion down to their communities.
Learning Society is a great opportunity to learn and collaborate and we are are looking forward to more sessions and to maybe creating a learning pool for matchmaking between sessions
Networking is something that most people seek in Learning Society initiatives. It is amazing to be on this platform, to be able to be part of the activities, join a breakout session, talk about innovation and how people can collaborate at very different levels, and get exposed to different ideas and ways of thinking. We must always use the power of collaboration through the Internet: we can all collaborate here, share stories of how we have overcome our challenges, and then build on this and address challenges we are facing at the moment.
In addition to participating in this relatively short event that lasts twenty four hours, we discussed the idea of creating a learning pool where people would be able to enter their favorite interests, areas they want to learn more about, what they are really good at, and what they can contribute so that others could choose them and add them to relevant projects. For example, if some project needs a team member who wants to learn or link something, it would be helpful to be able to pick someone listed on a platform like this.
Hearing great insights from each other has been an amazing experience and opportunity, and we are so happy to be with each other! Let us keep the connection: many of us posted our contact information in the chat and we invite others to contact us. We want to appreciate the hosts for this amazing gathering and we are looking forward to other great discussions.
