The Global Leadership for Sustainable Development programme, supported by the UN, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the IDG Foundation, concluded this week, with the participation of the core team of Contented, members of ASP.
The UN is concerned that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), set for 2030, won’t be achieved on time and that it might just be humans who are the problem. The Inner Development Goals (IDGs) make up an open-source framework of personal skills and capacities that researchers believe are needed for transformative action in delivering the SDGs.
The programme brought together organisations from countries that are less slow in responding to the climate emergency, such as the UK and Netherlands, with some of those whose cultures are even more resistant to change, across Africa, Latin America and Asia. The purpose is to seed a global ecosystem of policymakers and organisations working to identify, understand, communicate, develop and integrate the inner skills needed for sustainable development.
Felicia Jackson, Cayni Ibrahim, Nurul Mansor, ASP director Michelle Furtado and founding member Gerard Davies, participated alongside representatives from the Welsh Government, NatureScot, and Lancaster University. The six-month action research programme involved actively experimenting how to address the challenges of embedding inner development in their practices and organisations.
The UK IDG cohort will be joined this month [September 2024] by IDG Foundation Director Åsa Jarskog in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire, to share interventions based on ideas such as systems thinking, mindfulness, archetypal psychology, and deep ecology.
Gerard plans to facilitate a Deep Time Walk in memory of Schumacher College founder and pioneering scientist Dr Stephan Harding, who sadly died this week. Stephan was a close friend and collaborator of James Lovelock, whose Gaia theory considered the Earth to be a self-regulating living system, creating its own habitat, rather than the dead machine that human behaviour suggests. His theory became the foundation of Earth System Science.
Contented is planning to open this learning to practitioners who want to integrate the IDGs, tools and methodologies in their own sustainability work, developing individual and organisational leadership to accelerate change. They will be creating an introduction event for ASP Member on the Autumn.
For more information, contact michelle.furtado@contented.net.
