The new era of SDG conferences: UNLEASH
What happens when 1,000 young talents are brought together?
When I first started attending sustainability and innovation conferences, I really enjoyed them. New ideas! New people! Now, many conferences later they all feel relatively the same. Speakers are supposed to wow the audience with their concepts, while the rest of us passively learn new things that we potentially will take back to our lives. Between breaks there is mingling and small talk. Often times, I meet fascinating people, exchange a few words, and business cards and hope to connect in the future. Everything is more or less predictable.
This monotony is the exact reason I don’t like the majority of regular conferences now.There isn’t a dialogue between the audience.
The typical conference isn’t working for the majority of people, and they aren’t helping create the impact and spread the ideas they promise to do, especially when it comes to global challenges, innovation, and sustainability. Flemming Besenbacher, the chairman of Carlsberg Foundation feels similar. Which is why he and Henrik Skovby, the founder of Dalberg created UNLEASH.
UNLEASH Lab 2017, brought together 1,000 young global leaders called “Talents” from 139 countries to Denmark to work on tangible solutions for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 goals the UN initiated which are set to be reached by 2030. Talents were divided into this year’s 5 themes based on the SDGs, Education and ICT, Energy, Food, Health, Sustainable Consumption & Production, Urban Sustainability, and Water. The goal of the conference was to create tangible solutions, and their approach to enacting the conference illustrated that conviction.
Days after hearing a few speakers and having various interactive workshops and field trips, we divided into themes. I was assigned Sustainable Production and Consumption and was sent to a folk school in rural Denmark. For the next 5 days, I worked with 4 other talents from Denmark, Canada, South Africa, and Nigeria to collectively create our solution to the lack of transparency, sustainability, and customer knowledge in the clothing industry. It was exhausting, but it also pushed me to think about how my nationality and the current culture in which I live has shaped me. In my everyday work and school projects I’m surrounded by many nationalities and different perspectives. What made UNLEASH different is that I was matched with Talents I had little in common with apart from a passion for sustainability and the goal of producing a solution to the SDGs. This created a very stimulating environment and challenges. Hours were spent debating and attempting to articulate what we wanted to say beyond cultural barriers, while other moments were filled with tears, empathy, excitement. It was truly a cultural rollercoaster.
What I learned though, much more than our solution, just one of 200 solutions created, is that for these SDGs or any goal to be achieved there is a need for community and powerful conversations that matter.
In the end, the 1,000 UNLEASH Talents convened in Aarhus where we heard the Prime Minister of Denmark speak. It was then that I realized how connected I felt to the other Talents, even if I hadn’t interacted with them, because of our collective effort to reach the goals, and not just talk about them.
UNLEASH of course also had speakers, but what made this conference different is the community structure and framing of deep conversations. I’m so happy to have been a part of it!
