Making the Global Goals a Reality: A Call to Action

It’s been two and a half years since the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, also known as Global Goals, were unanimously adopted by 193 nations, as the world’s “must do” list for all people everywhere. From ending extreme poverty to ensuring equality and protecting our oceans—the goals are transformative, interdependent, universal, and required to continue life on Earth as we know it.

Encouragingly, I see more signs every week that the world’s financial and business leaders are orienting around the Global Goals as a sturdy framework for action. Like an irresistible movement gathering momentum, we’re starting to see the goals being talked about at conferences, mentioned in business reports, and included in classroom learning at all levels as challenges to be solved.

These are the first signals that our focus is starting to shift from the astonishing “what” of the goals to the audacious “how.” How are we going to actually bring these goals to reality? How can we—all of us—do our part wherever we live to inspire the people around us to join us?

As management and business educators in the AACSB community, we’re perfectly positioned to help answer that question. A key to the “how” for achieving the goals is by enabling global prosperity through business innovation, one of the three components of AACSB’s mission.

In support of this mission, we’re proud to offer the flexible, professor-facilitated AIM2Flourish assignment to all AACSB member and aspirant schools, as a turnkey way to engage students in Global Goals learning, leadership, and innovation.

Launched in 2015 at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University and housed in the Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, AIM2Flourish combines professor resources, the AIM2Flourish story platform, and an annual recognition initiative for the year’s best-of-the-best innovations stories for the Global Goals. (Read more about how AIM2Flourish works.)

As of April 2018, the AIM2Flourish assignment has been used at 57 schools worldwide by 63 professors. Working in groups or individually, over 4,100 students have published 1,020 stories on AIM2Flourish.com—each one showcasing a positive and profitable business innovation for the Global Goals. Our goal is to reach 100 schools this year, and we’d love for more institutions to join us.

In recognition of this year’s Earth Day, we invite you to spend a few minutes with some of our stories. We hope you’ll feel uplifted, inspired, and hopeful about the progress we’re making together toward the Global Goals.

This year’s 17 Flourish Prizes winning stories—one for each Global Goal—were written by students at 16 schools across nine countries and represent positive business innovations from across the world.

With two and a half years down, and only a little more than a decade left to go, the goals require us to move faster and in closer collaboration to bringing millions of business school students to Global Goals leadership and action. This week at ICAM is the perfect time to start, and go forward together, for the beautiful planet Earth we call home.

Connecting With AIM2Flourish

To offer AIM2Flourish curriculum at your school, please visit aim2flourish.com/schools. Please join AIM2Flourish’s active conversations about responsible leadership on Facebook and Twitter.

 
Sommers is the former director of AIM2Flourish.