The Start of Austin’s largest Social Impact Map aligned with the Global Goals
On April 24th, 2018 a powerfully beautiful thing happened: people from all corners of Austin came together to take the first steps towards acting locally while thinking globally.
The event that brought all these people together was Thinking Global Acting Local: Global Goals 101, hosted by SocialGood.us, Austin Social Innovators meetup and Impact Hub Austin. For three engaging hours, attendees learned about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, also called Global Goals) on a global and local level and participated in interactive activities.
The SDGs are a set of 17 goals developed under the auspice of the United Nations in 2030 that list the issues to be addressed by 2030 to advance towards a better world for all. While the United Nations is the owner of the SDGs, national governments are the one who are accountable for the national implementations and more importantly, it’s the responsibility of all actors of society, including businesses, regional and local governments, non-profit organizations and individual citizens to play their part towards achieving a better world for all.
The global perspective came from Boaz Paldi, Global Engagement Manager for the United Nations Development Program, while the local Austin perspective came through Brandi Clark Burton, Chief Inspiration Officer for EcoNetworking.
Ruben Cantu gave a great recap of how the community in Austin developed up to this point, after years of Austin “do-gooders” joining forces to act locally but not necessarily thinking globally in relation to the SDGs. Using the 17 SDGs as a reference point, a first workshop asked attendees to contribute towards identifying positive and negative issues in Austin, categorized under each of the 17 goals.
Following this, the audience was tasked with collectively contributing towards a stakeholder map by identifying government offices, for profit and nonprofits working around the issues previously identified. This collective knowledge network provided input on who is doing something on the identified issues and who isn’t but should be.
By the end of the evening every single one of the 17 goals had a ton of colorful post it notes listing out issues, both positive and negative, along with stakeholders active in the space or who should be active in that space. In next event, taking place on May 16th, participants will expand and reflect upon these findings.
Everyone was fired up to contribute because their input is going towards building out an Angel List or Crunchbase type “directory” for organizations working locally within all of the 17 Global Goals. Everyone’s contribution would be the initial data for Austin’s biggest Social Impact Heat Map project to be further developed at ATX Hack for Change taking place from June 1st to the 3rd. The objective is for anyone working on impact and social causes to understand the ecosystem, find each other and look for opportunities to collaborate.
The best part of the event was that it was just a kick-off event for a year’s worth of programming. Every month leading up to September, programming is going to focus on SDGs by bringing together global and local perspectives to collaborate and work towards acting locally while thinking globally. It all leads up to the Global Goals Jam on September 21–23. During this weekend, 40+ cities around the world will have hackathon-type gatherings where local changemakers come together to figure out how they can bring together resources and come up with ideas of how to make a difference and contribute towards the realization of the SDGs.
2018 is the year that Austin as a community said enough is is enough, we are going to act locally while thinking globally together. In doing so, Austin already started contributing to Goal 17, which may be one of the most important goals: Partnerships for the goals.
If you are interested to learn more about this project, please write to celine[a]socialgood.us or ruben[a]socialgood.us
