My SDG Path-1 | Starting Point: SDG Webinars

I thought it was just a small step forward, it turns out to be a total new playground to explore.

Life is not always about planning and executing, but lots of surprises coming up when you just start doing the things you truly have passions for.

Wenzheng

Sustainable Development Goals, aka SDGs, somehow become one of my most important tags nowadays.

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  UN Sustainable Development Goals

The story started from my AIESEC experience. As an international NPO organization, AIESEC is strongly connected to SDGs. The main product of AIESEC is actually the international volunteer projects based on different SDGs. Back then, I was an alumni from the talent management team who felt bored and powerless during the pandemic lockdown in Germany.

There were full of chaotic public extreme speeches and conspiracy theory on the social media. I got stressed out and disappointed by how people were reacting towards such challenging pandemic, especially the numbness and criticism purely for the sake of criticism from the young people.

I was thinking about the things we could do as a youth organization to contribute under the circumstance. I took a deep thought about the root of AIESEC. How to engage the students actively learn more about the real world, so they could better understand the complexities and develop the group empathy outside of the simplified social information bubbles?

The UN SDGs happened to be great framework for people to get involved. All the 17 SDGs are highly interconnected, each of them has multiple perspectives among social, political and environmental aspects. Additionally, the SDGs are really close to everyone’s life, which people seldom have the awareness of. There’s a large gap between the public awareness level and the idealistic understanding level of SDGs.

The idea of initiating the SDG Webinars within the college student group in Karlsruhe just came up at that time.

Since I was not an active member in AIESEC Karlsruhe back then, I contacted my old friends in the local committee and the AIESEC network and wrote a proposal for getting them onboard with this idea. Thankfully, my local committee president Till was super supportive and provided me the chance to try this idea out.

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  The poster of my first SDG Webinar

In July 2020, it was my fist time to implement the SDG Webinar around the SDG#1 No Poverty under the pandemic. My previous teammate as well as an experienced trainer Jenny helped my co-train the SDG workshop, which was proven as one of key success factors afterwards. Back then, I was totally a newbie for workshop design and training as well. However, “Learning by doing” such kind of AIESEC “belief” made it worked.

In the first SDG Webinar, the attendants were guided through the basic concepts of SDGs and SDG#1, then got involved with the group discussions around different related topics under their life experience from their original cultural backgrounds. If you were there, you would definitely influence by the vibes from the AIESECers. They were highly engaged into the topics and even the debate, which was totally beyond my expectation.

I was surely inspired by the positive feedbacks from the first SDG Webinar. What motivated me most, was the inspirations that the participants received, and many of them told me they want to join such events more often in the future.

Therefore, with help of my home LC Karlsruhe, I got on the path of SDG promotion and education for the longer term.

(Stories to be continued.)