SDG Week Canada in London

During SDG Week Canada 2024, Pillar Nonprofit Network teamed up with the Western Sustainability Office to co-host an event at Weldon Library, right in the heart of Western University’s main campus. Community SDG Connections was an event to build collaborations between the University and London community members who are involved in advancing the SDGs.

The audience included the Western community, social purpose organizations and individuals in London and area. We brought local leaders together who may not regularly interact in their daily work or academics, to demonstrate intersections across the SDGs and discuss some new ways they can connect. Our guest speakers included: Oana Branzei – Centre for Building Sustainable Value at Ivey Business School , Mystery Furtado – Type Diabeat-It, Tom Cull – Upper Thames River Conservation Authority – UTRCA , and Julie Ryan – Indwell

SDG Presentations

Dr. Oana Branzei shared about their work at Ivey Business School regarding regenerative agriculture. She referenced projects like The Future of Agri-food: Canada’s Leadership Opportunity and Regenerative Agriculture: The Role of Finance & the Value Chain with some of the highlights of the 138 page report Advancing Regenerative Agriculture in Canada and the article Unchaining supply chains: Transformative leaps toward regenerating social–ecological systems published last year. Her presentation touched on several SDGs including SDG2, SDG8, SDG9 and SDG12. She highlighted how partnerships (SDG17) was instrumental in each and everyone of those projects. The Ivey Business School was one of our partners in the Community Food Assessment Research Partnership.

Mystery Furtado shared about Type Diabeat-it and her work to promote health with a focus on equity-seeking groups. In her experience, there are barriers for partnerships and access to resources available for organizations. Another challenge that Mystery points out is how our healthcare system, an eurocentric model, is not appropriate for a diverse population with different cultures.

A lot of her work revolves around nutritious, health and affordable food. For Mystery, food is produce, and a tool and a resource. She also shared about the SDG impact of her organization. Acknowledging that: “when you are doing work in community you don’t always have the time and capacity to measure your impact.” Mystery used the SDG Impact Snapshot. A resource developed by SDG Cities summarizing their impact on SDG1, SDG2, SDG3, SDG10, SDG11, and SDG13.

Tom Cull talked about the history of Conservation Authorities in Ontario. Their creation was a response to urban development that would clear and cut natural areas to build and pave causing flooding in urban areas. Conversely, everything that happens on land ends up in the water.

Every five years, the UTRCA produces watershed report cards to report on local environmental conditions in each of the 28 subwatersheds within the upper Thames watershed. These reports summarize extensive environmental information, with the goal of guiding local environmental action and tracking environmental change. This project alone is a massive undertaking requiring extensive collaboration within several municipalities.

Each report card grades surface water quality and forest conditions, summarizes watershed features, provides recommended actions for improvement, and highlights progress made over five years. The grading follows standardized Conservation Authority Watershed Report Card guidelines developed for watersheds across Ontario. The main SDGs are SDG6, SDG13, SDG15

Report cards are ranked from A to E. Where ‘A’ is optimal conditions. The last report card has an overall D for watershed and forest conditions. 21 out of 28 watersheds are steady, considering the pressures from sprawl and urban development. Tom considers that an accomplishment. UTRCA is one of our SDG Cities Academy alumni.

Julie Ryan presented about Indwell, an established organization for more than 50 years. Indwell houses 1200+ people in seven communities in Southwestern Ontario. More than housing, they provide wraparound supports including addiction support, mental health, nursing services, fresh meals, skills training, and more. In London they already have two buildings and for their next project, Vision SoHo Alliance, a partnership with several other organizations, there will be 680+ units and Indwell is responsible for 138 of them. Their projects are built to one of the highest standards of passive housing, which means that they are extremely energy efficient while at the same time reducing cost of living with lower energy bills. Addressing poverty and the housing crisis directly, Indwell supports SDG1, SDG2, SDG3, SDG6, SDG11, and SDG13. Indwell is one of our SDG Cities Academy alumni.

One of the common threads throughtout the presentations was the importance of partnership to tackle the challenges and implement solutions.

Community Conversations

After the four short presentations, we had a quick survey to learn more about participants, followed by a lively discussion in a world café format.

The survey showed that 70% of the participants were familiar with the SDGs. When they think about the SDGs the three words that most come to mind are: important, collaboration, and change. Identifying intersections between areas was the most common way of engaging with the SDGs (1 out of 3 responses).

The World Café discussions considered the three SDG Principles: interconnection of environmental, social, economic dimensions, cross-sector collaboration, and leave no one behind. Questions explored included:

Are the SDG principles embedded into your work/schooling? How so?
What are your challenges & successes in working with the SDG principles?
What forms of collaboration have you found helpful in advancing the SDG principles?
What opportunities for collaboration did you notice from the presentations and discussion today?
How can we raise awareness and engagement with the SDG principles?
Based on the presentations and discussions today, what are some new ways you can embed the SDG principles in your work or academics?

The event was an excellent opportunity to expose Western University community and local organizations to each other, raising awareness about different issues and demonstrate how they are being addressed; promoting a generative dialogue; and creating space for new collaborations to take place.

The importance of the SDGs and the application of the SDG principles were clear. So, it was the need to host more events like this, scale up and even systematize it in schools, universities and colleges. Many discussions explored possibilities to implement that in ways that advance the work that is already being done while providing students with relevant experiences. Recognizing that an effort like that requires resources that are not always available and a shared understanding of the challenges that is not always present. To capture the event’s highlights, we had the graphic recorder Emma Richard, creating a visual summary of the presentations and discussions.