FYE 101: A Better and More Sustainable Future

Imagine a world with no poverty, a world in which hunger is a relic of the past, where clean air and water are accessible to everyone, quality education available to all, gender equity a universal reality, and societies becoming ever more prosperous thanks to advanced transportation and communications infrastructure. Although this may sound like a utopian fantasy, they are just some of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which call for bold efforts to foster dramatic social and economic development around the world by the year 2030. Together, the SDGs are a summons to harness humanity’s ingenuity, organization, and idealism. This course will introduce students to some of the world’s most pressing problems in development by exploring the UN SDGs and various efforts to achieve them. Through case studies and team-based exercises, students will learn about how different sectors--government, business, and the nonprofit sector--approach development from diverse perspectives. For their final project, students will work in teams to design an initiative that will address one of the 17 SDGs. They will identify a development problem, assess its impact on a community, and then propose a set of solutions to the problem they have identified. Proposed solutions will identify: the stakeholders affected and how they will be engaged; the resources required and how they will be obtained; the impact of the political environment and how it might influence the course of the project, and the expected impact of the project on the community.