OSUN Theme: Sustainability and Climate
Sustainable Development and Social Enterprise
Term: January 30, 2024 – May 21, 2024Level: 300-Level
Day/Time: Tuesday, Thursday 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM EST
Instructor: Eban Goodstein, Bard College
The UN's Sustainable Development Goals highlight 17 key areas for global progress, ranging from food security to women's empowerment to climate change action. One way to achieve these goals is through social enterprise: creating for-profit and non-profit organizations whose mission is to advance one or more of the SDGs. This collaborative, cross-institution course explores the global drivers of change that led to the UNSDG's, with a particular focus on Social Enterprise solutions. Bard students will work with and learn from classes in Colombia, Kyrgyzstan, Palestine and other countries through a mixture of synchronous online, weekly global classes, combined with in-person, project-based learning. The synchronous portion of the course provides a critical introduction to the SDGs, and the forces behind the global change, ranging from climate to technology to income inequality. The experiential component of the course involves the students conducting shared research projects on local enterprise solutions to the SDG's. Student teams will choose a sector of interest -- energy, food, affordable housing, immigration, toxic exposure, and map the regional ecosystem of for-profit and non-profit enterprises seeking to address these challenges. The projects will include deep dives into the strategies pursued by select enterprises within their sector, and the course will culminate in a report designed for the enterprise stakeholders within the system.
Credits: 4 US / 8 ECTS