Envoys Sustainable Development Goals

Reflection: 

In this two-day summit, we began by looking at an overview of all 17 sustainable development goals. Our delegation of around two hundred students debated the level of importance of each goal and discussed our personal proximity to these goals. We then broke into groups and focused on a specific goal that we researched in depth and then presented to the whole delegation at the close of the summit. 

My group, composed of around 9 individuals, all from different countries, chose to research Sustainable Development Goal number ten; Reducing Inequalities. We chose this goal because current events reflected the sad truth of international politics prioritizing politics themselves over people and their inherent, deserved rights. 

One aspect of creating an informational slideshow was to also include an element of action. Given that we only had a mere few hours together to slow the problems of the world, we decided to write a template that we would then send to applicable elected officials in our respective areas of the world. 

It was largely interesting to hear diverse perspectives from students my age on what an inherent/ deserved right is versus what is not. Some members of the group shared the idea that food, water, and shelter were the only inherent rights of a human being, while I along with a couple of other people thought that an education, a right to freedom of speech, and religion. was included under the umbrella of inherent rights, among others. It is interesting that even at the high school level beliefs can be so different to result in a compromise about how to address rights on a project. If we apply this to the level of international politics, how can it be justified to “compromise” regarding these rights? They affect real people, unlike our project which was simply to further enhance our knowledge around the issue.