Taking Aim at the SDGs
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs if you're up to speed with the lingo) is a list of 17 goals to achieve by 2030 to help us build a better world. It's the best framework that we have in place for rallying people, companies, and organisations together to work for impact, and is a plan that has been agreed on by 195 countries, more nations agreeing on such a plan than ever before.
When this master plan to save human kind from itself was drawn up in September 2015, it was expected to shape and dictate global policy. Two years on, and those gathered beneath the banner are still too few for us to launch any meaningful assault.
As a young company started out of anger and passion to help people take action on Climate Change, the SDGs were something that we immediately gravitated towards. In the beginning, all our company had was enthusiasm. Every day was a 12 hour frenzy fuelled by caffeine and blind optimism. The SDGs provided a means for us to channel our energy, and to be much clearer about what we wanted to achieve. Counting Carbon is now proud to say that we are targeting Goal 12, Sustainable Consumption and Production, and Goal 13, Urgent Action to Combat Climate Change.
The SDG Factory held by Impact Hub Geneva on Thursday the 12th of October was a major step in detailing our plan to helping the world reach these targets. We worked on the necessity of gender equality for a healthy company culture, the potential of partnerships between start-ups and large corporations to achieve the SDGs, and how to develop key performance indicators to track the progress of the impact we intend to make.
In the all-too-glorified world of the workaholic founder/entrepreneur/sleazy car salesman, large corporations are seen as the cause of all of the world's evils. They're slow and dull, they won't give us money but want to own our ideas, and they probably even stole the microwave from our co-working space kitchen. Thus the workshop on partnerships was particularly useful to us to help myth-bust some of the preconceptions of both parties.
So, given that we're now in the spirit of collaboration, if you're reading this and want to do something to help achieve goals 12 and 13 of the SDGs please get in touch. Even if you were the one who stole our microwave...
