Event: Making the SDGs real and rewarding to West Australians

How can West Australians communities, organisations and individuals connect with each other and the world in a spirit of collaboration inspiration and hope?

This was the question posed through a pre workshop infographic shared with participants for an early December workshop in Perth on the Sustainable Development Goals.

The public workshop was attended by over 70 people from diverse organisations and included plenary, panel, interactive work and fun including theatre and planning collaboration for the SDGs.

The day commenced with an inspirational welcome to Country by George Hayden from Curtin University’s Centre for Aboriginal Studies. This was followed by a plenary presentation that set the scene for building on the Millennium Development Goals through universal global goals. It highlighted the importance of national action to address climate change and tackle inequality while improving wellbeing and strengthening international collaboration. A panel of WACOSS, Conservation Council of WA and Oxfam emphasised the challenges as well as benefits of innovative and integrated solutions and greater cooperation across all sectors.

Participants shared moving and inspirational stories of the complex interactions required to achieve sustainability through Playback theatre. This provided a creative springboard for the diverse groups and individuals to then generate ideas for action through a facilitated open space exercise. Through the open space session people worked in groups on their own ideas under the framework of the SDGs. These covered diverse topics including: national policy development for collaborative implementation, bringing SDGs onto the political agenda, civil society/university led work on indicators and reporting, communicating the goals in WA, cultural diversity, peace and nuclear disarmament, good news stories, local and affordable food and creativity.

The workshop was hosted by Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute in partnership across sectors with the West Australian Council of Social Service, Oxfam, The Conservation Council of Western Australia, The One World Centre, Volunteering Western Australia, the Murdoch Centre for Responsible Citizenship and Sustainability and the University of Western Australia Centre for Social Impact and SDSN Australia/Pacific.

Building on the workshop outcomes, planning and coordination by interested organisations and individuals will continue early in 2016 and a video from the day highlighting cross sectoral collaboration will be completed by then along with an initial summary of key SDG literature.