 Good morning, everyone. Good morning and good afternoon. In fact, thank you so much for joining us today for this plenary session on university transformations for the SDGs moving from the concept to action. It's wonderful to see that we have many people from around the world and we want to encourage your participation so please do use both the question and answer function as well as the chat function and we'll be monitoring these two areas, sharing links and then bringing some of your questions to the panelists. We're going to get started with our colleague Tal Kestin, the manager of SDSN Australia Pacific and New Zealand. And she's going to walk us through the trajectory of how we've reached to today's session and why we think this is a very important topic and what are some of the updates from last year's session. So Tal, whenever you're ready. Hello everyone and welcome from me as well. As Maria said, my name is Tal Kestin and I'm the network manager for SDSN Australia, New Zealand and Pacific. I'm coming to you today from Melbourne, Australia, and I'd like to acknowledge that I'm coming from the lands of the Kulin nation and my respect to the elders past present and emerging. As Maria said, my role today is to help set the trajectory for this session. The main part of the session will be a really exciting conversation around university transformations for the SDGs. And we have a really exciting range of speakers today and Maria will introduce you to them a bit later. But this session really started with the guide Accelerating Education for the SDGs, which was published last year around the same time of year as now and my role is really to try to give you on behalf of the team. The guide team and introduction to the guide and some of the really interesting follow ups that we've been doing since then around it, including the session. So as I said, the guide Accelerating Education for the SDGs was published a year ago in fact at ICSD 2020. With the aim of inspiring and empowering universities and other higher education institutions to provide the learners with the knowledge skills and mindsets to contribute to solving the world's sustainable development challenges and achieving the sustainable development goals. The covers of the why the wash and the how of how you can universities do education for the SDGs. And there's some really, I guess key messages or outcomes that came out to us from doing this guide. And the first is that education for the SDGs is a really critical role for universities, because the urgency of addressing climate change and other sustainable development challenges means that we really need everyone on board to be able to help achieve these outcomes, help address all these issues, regardless of where they are in life and what profession they are. And universities are really in a unique position to provide this. The second one is that there's a whole lot of ways that education for the SDGs and it includes really quite a broad range of skills knowledge and mindsets. And there's lots of different ways that universities can incorporate them and integrate them into pretty much every aspect of what universities do. And really what's going to help with that is that universities can take a strategic process to implement and mainstream it. But one of the things that really emerged to us was that there are some aspects of education for sustainable development that are really essential. There are particularly approaches to education that are interdisciplinary, that are action orientated, and that are in collaboration with other sectors that are quite hard to do within the way universities are currently structured. And if we really want to be addressing these urgent sustainable development challenges. But strategic approaches might not be fast enough, and that maybe we need to look at how universities actually operate and think about how to do that differently. So while the guide is actually one of the SDGs' most downloaded resources, we always knew that it was not going to be the be all and end all. And in fact it was really designed as a springboard for ongoing conversations and engagement with higher education institutions. We realized that there's going to be a lot of work to help spread the word to universities in different contexts. That this is a rapidly rapidly developing area and as universities are doing so much work in this area so there's a lot of work to really keep current on what's going on. And that there's also some aspects of the guide that we felt needed to be explored in more depth. And so this session really is to give you a bit of a progress report on what we have been doing so far on these areas, and a taste of what's next. Particularly I am going to cover some of the translations that have taken place and more information around the case studies that have been accompanying the guide and additional opportunities for dialogue with higher education institutions. And the rest of the session will focus on this new area around university transformations for the SDGs. So first of all translations. In the past year. Three translations of the guide were done in Chinese, Korean and Spanish, and with great thanks to SDSN networks around the world for helping facilitate those. But today we're really super excited to announce that two new translations are available. So here's one with thanks to the SDSN Amazon network and a French translation, thanks to the SDSN Canada and particularly to the University of Laval. That's that will be available in a couple in very shortly I'm not trying exactly but in a matter of days, and they're all available from the SDSN website and I think that link has been posted to the chat. Now case studies of how universities are implementing education for sustainable development. Around the world have been a really important part of the original guide and we had about 50 case studies hosted in a separate website hosted by the technical University of Madrid, accompanying the guide. And to keep things fresh and updated, we ran another call for case studies in 2021. And today, I'm really super thrilled to announce that we've now got a new set of 75 new case studies up on the website. We've chosen from over 200 submissions representing over 40 countries, and they really include a very wide range of initiatives around co curricula and curriculum activities community engagement and enabling actions that universities can take internally to support education for sustainable development for the SDGs and within the sector more broadly, and they're searchable by different types of keywords. It was a huge effort and huge thanks then to the SDSN Secretariat, the SDSN networks and the team at UPM, the Technical University of Madrid. And we are really encouraging you to go out now and check these new case studies. They're really very exciting. Just before I hand over back to Maria. I want to mention that we actually have a whole session theme around university transformations here at ICSD. We'll be hearing from universities around the world about how they're transforming the governance organization, teaching, learning and researching towards addressing the SDGs. It's over four sessions, one was yesterday but there's still three more to come, including one immediately following this plenary. So, please join us for that as well. And I'm now going to pass you on to Maria, who will take you to the next part of the session. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, we're very excited about this collaboration and what's coming next and as I said very, very insightfully, the guide is just the beginning of a conversation and we want to really create a community of practice across the world with universities sharing experiences. We're going to move now to the next part of our session, led by our colleague Wendy Purcell from Harvard University. It is 3am in Boston right now so she has kindly agreed to participate via a video, a very inspirational one I will say so. Let's go ahead with you please. Welcome to this SDSN panel on transforming universities. I'm Wendy Purcell and I'm delighted to have been invited to offer some framing, some opening comments to frame our discussions. So before we do that, let's just kind of take a moment to remind ourselves that what we do here in higher education really matters. I think Geoff Sacks put it beautifully when he talked about our opportunity as universities and colleges to connect with other actors in the ecosystem to really tackle the shared challenges of sustainable development. So when we look at our transformational impact it's through our people, it's through the work of our students and alumni, it's through our faculty and staff, it's recognising our broader contribution that through those people the impact that we're having out there in society. And just think how that was challenged during these last 18 months or so as we tackled a shared crisis, a shared global crisis that of COVID-19. It was a massive disruption to all of us at a very difficult time, I know for many in the sector, but we also saw I think in many ways a renewed commitment to the idea of equity as new inequities were revealed to us during the pandemic. And we saw this incredible untapped change potential for higher education as we gathered around a shared problem, a shared purpose and we really did move at a pace of change that we probably haven't seen in the sector for a long time. So adopting a renewed focus on technology, a recognition of what was important, a real sense of everybody rowing in the same direction. So if we look at that, we did a piece of work around this, how can in that space of disruption and change, how can we align some of our activities towards the SDGs? How can we help us navigate the kind of disruption that we've all just experienced and frankly are still experiencing? So we saw how the sector reacted to that crisis, then that more kind of deliberate response to the crisis. So now where we are is reimagining our broader contribution to creating a world where no one is left behind and this opportunity now to renew our social contract as higher education with a society that we serve. So in this sense of this COVID-19 crisis, we recognize that we learned about ourselves and we learned about higher education. And so I think one of the things that we can think about today is what did we learn about business as usual? What new knowledge and capabilities and networks and frankly confidence in our own abilities did we discover during that period? And now how can we best apply those developed renewed kind of capacities and capabilities that we experienced over that period? And can we really take that sense of confidence about gathering round a shared problem, recognizing our ability to act in a crisis? Can we take that renewed contribution of higher education through the crisis of the pandemic and apply it now to the climate crisis and the challenges of sustainable development? So when we look at a choice potentially in front of us, are we going to continue to embrace the kind of incrementalism and making important but slow progress towards tackling the climate crisis and those other challenges of sustainable development as represented by Agenda 2030? Or are we going to seize this moment to really transform and adopt a kind of transformational kind of accelerated contribution to delivering against the SDGs? So when we look at the SDGs, we see them very much as this shared purpose, the nearest thing frankly we have to a strategy for our world. And can we use the SDGs and kind of as I've said on a couple of occasions put on our SDG goggles and look afresh at the mission of higher education. So can we take that sense of shared purpose, renewed confidence in our collective ability to act and look afresh at our teaching and learning? Recognizing the things that we want to continue to do and recognizing some of the things maybe that we need to do going forward in terms of a renewed sense of purpose as we transform our institutions. Can we take the same fresh eyes and fresh look at our research and scholarship and think about the impact that we want to have in terms of delivering against this inclusive, sustainable planet agenda for humanity? Can we think about our role in our communities, our civic engagement and our reach deep beyond the campus walls into this multi-faceted stakeholder partnerships that we're all involved with? Can we really harness the force for innovation and the relationships that we enjoy with our students while they're with us and as alumni, recognizing their role as partners in this transformation ahead? When I think about our students and that force, that partnership with them, I think it sits really well with the idea of the SDGs as a shared collective purpose. And I think we're seeing students already seeking purpose over a simply following a college major. So I think we all accept that the challenges ahead are just too complex for any one discipline or frankly any one organization to solve alone. It's demanding of us as universities to continue the path that we've been on to connect what we do to the society that we serve. This sense of radical collaboration and taking up our fullest contribution as a partner, as somebody who can contribute to these multi-stakeholder partnerships that we need to deliver against the goals. We through the SDSN have assembled some incredible advice and wisdom through this education guide. And I think it might be not too early to share with you that we're developing the next one now to take the subject of transforming universities. So your input and advice through this kind of discussion is going to be really important. And I also wanted to remind you of two upcoming books. One, a book that's coming out next year that I'm co-editing around a handbook to think really deeply about sustainability in higher education and positioning it, as we say, as an agenda for transformational change. So please look out for that. And I'm so grateful to all the people who are contributing to that. And to put on your radar an opportunity and invitation, frankly, to invest with us in a series of 17 books being put together through Emerald that I'm editing a series editor of around higher education and the sustainable development goals. And this is an invitation to contribute your cases, your ideas, your thoughts. So please do reach out to me. So let's think about our time together now in this panel. Let's reflect on the heritage, the purpose of higher education and be really clear about what's not changing. Our commitment to academic excellence, our commitment to realizing talent in our society. But let's also be quite open with each other about what needs to change. What can we let go of? What can we do to amplify the innovation that we saw during the recent COVID crisis? And what does this all mean to transforming our universities? So something that I would be very interested in learning from our esteemed panel and this discussion is how might we best harness these new capacities and capabilities to fuel an SDG led transformation of our universities? So have a wonderful discussion. Thank you so much for your kind invitation. And I look forward to learning from all of you. Wonderful. So I think this is a perfect keynote to set us for for our panel. I'm going to ask our panelists to turn on their cameras and I'm going to briefly just go through there the least and mention from where they're joining us. So Liz Price is joining us from Manchester Metropolitan University. Tawana Cooper is joining us from Pretoria University. John Swates is joining us from the Monash Sustainable Development Institute and Carlos Matthijks from the Technology for Human Development Institute at UPM. You can see their full bios in our ICSD website. I encourage you to visit that. And I'm going to open up the panel directly. I think Wendy launched a very good question to get us started with. How can we harness those capacities and capabilities that academia developed to adapt and to confront the crisis of COVID in support of the SDGs and the challenge of climate change. Would any one of you want to start? If you want, I can have a first reaction. In my opinion, Wendy's call to radical collaboration is a fundamental issue now. Of course, transformation is not going to happen if we don't take seriously what radical collaboration means. And we have to admit that at universities where we are used to practicing what we could name transactional, transactional collaboration or linear collaboration. And the change from this way of conceiving collaboration transactional to radical collaboration is, I would say, a systemic change. In my experience at my university in Madrid in Spain, this change towards radical collaboration or transformative collaboration means at least three major changes. Of course, we need changes at the normative or institutional level. We need a lot of, I would say, boring innovation in the way we conceive our norms, incentives and institution. Second, we need to manage things in other way. We need to demolish many silos, departmental or disciplinary silos, but also mental silos. And finally, we need new ways of conceiving leadership. As Otto Scammer said some years ago, we need to go beyond the ecosystems in which our universities are many times behaving towards real ecosystems of practicing. And finally, as Wendy mentioned, not only exploring the new linkages, new ways of doing things among us as scholars, but also thinking in a new way the kind of relationship that we establish with all the agents of the society. So radical collaboration is a very fundamental issue and we had to, we should think seriously on how do we provoke these kinds of collaborations. Thank you Carlos, I think that's a great point. Would anyone want to follow up? I am wondering, for example, how much did the COVID crisis help learn about those radical collaborations? How many new and unexpected collaborations came up because of this crisis? And can we issue some of those learnings? Can we use some of those learnings for the future? Yeah, so if I may, I think, you know, as difficult as it might sound, one of the things that became necessary because of COVID and let me just say also that COVID by the way is a symptom of larger disruptions that the world and societies were facing. So if you stick to COVID, only you might narrow your imagination if you like. The way already the world was facing many multiple continuous ongoing disruptions, including the planet crisis, but not only the planet crisis. The economy is that do not deliver for everybody in society, so growing inequality, poverty, unemployment, and also feeding into environmental destruction and all of those things, using fossil fuels for example. But also what was happening in the higher education sector is that there was a drift of universities looking inwards instead of projecting into society and being of society. So I think the radicalism needs also I think a reimagining the role of universities in a reimagined society, because it's not useful to have universities reimagined or become radical. If the intention is not to also change society or to contribute to societal change. And so I think that those twin those two things are interlinked and of course it can't just be universities, other institutions too but today we're talking about universities of course. So so that reimagination of both the university and society abstract sounds like typical university staff, what a university president or vice chancellor like myself would say. So practically then what did we do in our universities because I think that is what we're looking to do to do. Recognizing that we live in a disrupted world and continuous ongoing disruptions that are not about to stop, and therefore it's agent to be both visionary, strategic and intentional. If you don't follow through on all of the three to have the imagination to be visionary and to be strategic and then to be internationally intentional is not going to happen. So it means of course curriculum transformations. It means also of course recognizing the, that you have to break the hallowed silos of the universities, the departments, the institutes and centers that often do the same thing, but do not talk to each other. So creating the spaces if you like for, for disrupting the way academia is organized, but of course recognizing that you have to fly the plane, you have to fix the plane and change it while you are flying it. People still want their degrees and want some basic research done. The inter-disciplinary trans-disciplinary approach then became very important for us as the investors of Victoria. We fortunately in not a very coherent fashion, but going in that direction before COVID, we were constructing what we call trans-disciplinary collaborative platforms. One of them is one that is sitting behind where I'm sitting, I look like I'm sitting inside the Future Africa Institute and campus, which is a dedicated campus where people can live and meet there. But the idea is not people become inhabitants of the space. They come to collaborate nationally, continentally and globally. And then also they get to know each other. And by knowing each other, they begin to realize the limits of what they know and what they do not know. And then in that space it can be co-creation of new knowledge, but this time directed towards not what a university is good for. You know, the excellence with the metric citations, Google indexes, edge indexes is rather what is about the impact on society. In other words, where I started off bringing the university closer to society. Before of this, we spent, perhaps something close to 10 million US dollars to build platforms like this. This one is dedicated to addressing the complex, complicated, wicked problems of Africa, and the STGs encompass all of those things. So one of the things also, if I might say is that sometimes it's not useful to sound instrumental and say, we are doing these to achieve the STGs. Many people attend off, some people attend off by that. It's rather to say what complex, complicated issues are we and what frames can we use. STGs is a powerful global frame, if you like. They are national development plans. They are continental plans. So South Africa is a 2030 plan concise with the STGs. Africa has a 2063 plan, the Africa we watch. And so if you frame them in that way, then the radical collaboration comes in because you can then bring in governments, continental organizations, business and civil society. But I think for me the silos are very important. Siloes between university and society must break those, disrupt those, since you live in a disrupted way, intentionally disrupt those things that hinder human progress and threaten our planet. I like to stop there for the time being. Wonderful, John. Liz, you go first. Oh, thank you, John. Thank you, Carlos and to one of those are fantastic points and I'd just like to sort of highlight some of the things that we've been doing in Manchester because what we found at this very difficult time of disruption this this agenda was quite empowering for people. So we were able to through trying to change our sustainability strategy and transform it. We were able to engage people's imagination and their passion to really help develop our new transformational strategy so we engage with students and staff together with external organizations. And we were really driven by their agenda and we've got some incredibly positive impacts from that. And as an outcome of that we've really been able to drive forward what we do as a university. And one of the methods we use to do that is we have a carbon literacy training course where we train our students to be trainers, and our own students chain train the senior leadership of the university. And that was transformational as well so we were able to get a sort of bottom up top down approach to this this transformation, working internally in the university and externally. And we offered some cross disciplinary projects that all our students could get involved in linked to external organizations during the COVID pandemic and all this was delivered online. And the passion and the engagement from our students was absolutely outstanding. And we're kind of using that as a platform now we have a program called rise which is interdisciplinary across our university, or students can engage in it. Working with external organizations to accelerate the SDGs. And that's really proved a very positive platform and it's empowered staff and students to drive this forward and break down some of those silos. And we're not there yet, but everybody was so impassioned by by the success of this sort of emerging activity that it's now got huge support for embedding ESD and education for the Sustainable Development Goals across the university. And it's something that the whole university is embracing with with a real passion. And so, using students and this new form of leadership that Carlos and Twana were talking about is incredibly powerful, because everybody just feels part of a community with students our staff and our external stakeholders to drive this agenda forward and we found that that's been a really successful model for us, you know we're not there yet but we're certainly on our way and that's worked incredibly successfully for us. So, I agree with Carlos and Twana and Liz that we have to break down the silos. But I do think we have to reflect why the silos are there. And how are we going to break them down longer term, not just when there's the COVID crisis. The second point I'd make is that COVID is such an immediate crisis that in many ways it's easy to break down the silos because it's so disruptive. And in a sense we had a clear mission which is to reduce death and sickness and support communities and try to recover from COVID. Whereas the SDGs and climate change is a much more diffuse challenge. And I think a lesson you can draw is that we need to set clearer missions or priorities if we're going to have an impact on the SDGs. If we simply say we must address climate change or we must address the SDGs, most people find that too complex. So I think we have to be very clear about the missions. And then the final point I'd make is that certainly in Australia, but I think in most countries, one of the reasons universities have been more prominent through COVID is because our health and medical faculties, nursing and other faculties are much more collaborative and intertwined in the profession than the rest of the universities. So most of the professors and clinicians and leading nurses are also practitioners. They're working the field. That's not true of the rest of the university where most of the people are stuck in the university that aren't working the profession as well. And so I think that if we're going to have a real impact, we've got to have much greater interplay between the university and the professions. That we research and that we educate for. That's also a great point, John. And there are a couple of questions already from the audience, but I think maybe before jumping into them, I would want to pick up this question of leadership because I think several of you have made a point about this. What would it mean to move from these ecosystems to this ecosystem? And what is the right balance between these disruptions that are happening bottom up versus having a leadership that is buying into this transformation, like we have in the case of the Pretoria University? And how much do we need of both of these happening at the same time? Like Liz was saying in her example. Maria, if you want about leadership and the contradiction between top down and bottom up movements, I would say that what we need is an intermediary function that is designed to sustain the kind of ideas, innovative experiences that appear in our campuses, but that are not many times connected and it's very difficult to sustain them in the time. And at the same time, this intermediary function has also to be able to spread the normative and institutional changes that are also necessary from the top. So I think there is like a missing link between both the bottom and the top. And at least in the experience in our university that is a big technical university is that we can create these intermediary spaces. And this is for me a precondition for starting a real change process, a change process in terms of management and also in terms of how we conceive leadership at the university, at an institution like a university. So it's not top down, it's not bottom up the question, but you have not to choose both are important, but what you need is an intermediary function that is crucial for sustaining the movement towards the change we are looking for. So, so I think to continue on what I agree with Carlos, and for me is real because I am the university leader, I'm the vice chancellor and president so I struggled with that, or I have to negotiate that on a daily basis. You also have to think of the traditional institutional cultures of universities, where even with top down a university is still a very diffuse institution, and what John was earlier on happens many academics are comfortable in their skin doing what they do in their offices in their rooms, in their laboratories, they, they think about the societal impact is secondary and not necessarily their own agenda right. So investors always been strange in that fashion that there is a top leadership which might decree or say it wants to do this, but actually what happens on the ground is something different. And so, so even when you try and introduce a new leadership style, people might actually not believe it they'll say but well this is the particular guy what he wants to be seen, I'm going to do what I want to do. So, so, so, so it's, it's, it's not an easy thing, but it's important to actually target, and that is why an investor pictorial what we have done is to say the one problem of a university is not just that disciplinary silos and others is that people do not actually know each other and might never meet. I've met people recently, we've worked here for 30 years, and introduced them to people who have worked here for 30 years, and they're all professors and they're doing things that are overlapping. And so, the transdisciplinary interdisciplinary platforms are working well for us in that regard, in that they are the places where people get to convene meet and to present a without prejudice what they know and what they do not know, and see whether there can be any connections, some connections happen, but then it requires visibility by the leader of the university. In many universities people have never seen the leader never met them never heard of them, or read about them like any member of the public. So I have a very different style if you like, where I am very present across the university, and personally convene some of these, these platforms because also if you can come if you can succeed in convening and be communicative of substance and understanding the diversity of your institution and begin to put in building blocks for inclusivity, while understanding diversity and I'm not talking about demographic diversity. I'm talking about the diversity of ideas and inclusivity of approaches, and also co-creating new approaches, but co-creating them also with the business, government and civil society. They have their own connections, but we're not everybody's the same. So leveraging what people know and recognizing it, begins if you like to create a much more what Carlos was trying to say is neither, it's neither vertical nor horizontal, is something being co-created and the transformations okay in that space, but also introducing societal actors or stakeholders actually creates a new dynamic is no longer university people competing against each other for the highest citations and H indexes. It's actually how can you are being confronted with people in society looking for solutions. Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more and I think part of my role with a number of other colleagues is to be that mid person who drives these activities forward, but using the sort of energy from our students and from our senior leadership to sort of have the agency to do that. But you're quite right, most academics are incredibly busy people and whatever we do has to have meaning for them and it has to be driven by them and it has to work for them. And so through this process of collaboration, like you to honor we've really tried to drive this forward so that it has meaning for those people are going to drive it forward. And that might be different for different groups and as you say having those opportunities those interdisciplinary conversations and that co-creation is incredibly important. And we've tried to amplify this a little bit we drew heavily in the UK on the SCSN guidance when we rewrote the quality assurance and sort of QAA and advanced HG guidance in the UK which is one of the new case studies. And we were delighted to say that now what's happened is to support that agenda. It's now a requirement for all UK higher education institutions to consider ESD or ESDGs when they look at their discipline benchmark statements to try and break down some of these disciplinary silos and make it something that is something that it's just the norm to do these kind of things. So I couldn't agree more and I think following on from John's point I couldn't agree more with that either in that the challenge now is to make that happen across the university. And it's not just enthusiasts, it's despite the overwhelming enthusiasm from everyone that I've talked to in the institution it's about maintaining those activities and making sure as John says that it's not just something that is a sort of response to the COVID sort of situation, but that we can drive it forward and really implement it as a whole institution approach. And that you're right John that is the challenge going forward and I think but I think all the elements that we've talked about today are really important and the other thing I think is that people feel empowered. They feel respected, they feel energized when they do this kind of work. And I think academics and professional services colleagues in universities value feeling valued they value feeling energized they value making an input. And I think these are all powerful things in our agenda that we can use to drive this forward. John, do you do you want to take it on or shall I There are so many questions I'm thinking we should try to get through a few more. So, so let me throw one question from from the audience. I think it connects with with just what we were discussing right now so how much strategic is it in your experience to overcome academic silos thinking about john joined and strong approach and co passing both learning and projecting opportunities which could involve academics and students together. It links to yet another question from from the audience about involving citizens in the work of the university so do you have any experience in this I know Carlos that that's you do engage citizens and how much do you think this this can help break those silos and respond perhaps to what john one of the questions that john send us launched also why do we have these silos and how can we disrupt them in a in a more permanent way. So I'm happy to jump in on that to start with. I think if we don't operate in that transdisciplinary way that is with researchers from across different faculties but also with the community with government with industry, then how can we expect to have any impact. We won't. And we need to have a sense of modesty about universities and what the rest of the community thinks about us. The reality is that they don't necessarily think we've got the answers. We don't have all the answers. And so what we should be doing is working with those who are in whatever field it is whether it's gender or peace or climate. Those people that are in the field the businesses the public servants the community members designing our research and working on solutions from the start. We're doing that we do a lot of work and I do a lot of work on water, both in Australia, but also in Indonesia and Fiji and other countries. And if you're going to design say an urban water system in a Pacific Island, you can't do that from a university in Australia. But we do have some technologies and some knowledge about systems that can contribute to the work of the people in in Fiji in design redesigning the place that they live in a much more sustainable way. So I think it's that starting from the beginning with all of the affected people being part of the planning and part of the solution. Yeah, when I think you wanted to jump in too. Yeah, so so as John says I think the last statement that everything joins it by the last statement is the co creation element. So, so I often have an expression that you know, you must avoid a situation where universities create solutions looking for a problem. Rather actually co create solutions with society stakeholders. This does not mean that the public knows the solutions because they have the problem because knowledge still has a role to play. But it means that knowledge must be intentionally directed at the problems that they end up the best way to do so is what used to be called the participatory approach in development. And that's very, very, very important. So in our university I think to answer the question that how to involve citizens is that we have at least 55,000 students this year. 33,000 of our students are in community and in social engagement projects, either as the intentional design of their programs, or what is often called voluntary voluntary activities, but even those are not allowed if they are not informed by arising from the teaching of the courses or arising from research projects or embedded for senior students, masters and PhD in research projects. So the, so therefore we are present in society if you like, and some of our competitive advantage in South Africa and Africa is that we have such a huge intentional presence in society. Then we do the same with industry so that we ensure that all industry professional programs have an industry advisor report and mentors from industry and some give us internship opportunities. We also have a large incubator for entrepreneurship where the mentors are alumni who are actually successful entrepreneurs themselves. And so that way, in a sense, everywhere you go, our university's essence is known. We also host and co-run some government programs together with the government where they let capacities always better if they house a particular unit of the government or at the university or with the university. And that way actually our knowledge directly impacts society and the programs of national government. None of this is very easy. It can be very messy situation, but the issue is you are embedded in society, you are not apart from society. Me, Maria, go back to the question of society or citizens. In my opinion, we all are some people committed with changing our university. We all have a common challenge. We need demonstration that transformation with all the implication that the world has transformation happens and that university can be key, provoking real and at a scale transformations. And in this sense, many times we only can show a portfolio of small activities projects very interesting but that we have to admit that are not transformative. So I think we have to have the ambition of demonstrating how working with this co-creation mentality that has been mentioned, we can be part of real transformations in our cities, in our environments because only demonstrating that we are transformative, we can transform our institutions. Things part of the same thing. We cannot wait for our institutional transformation for them to be part of transformation. We have to at the same time to be transformative to demonstrate that we can change at the scale systems in our society to have the legitimacy to go back to our universities and to show that this is the way. So any of my colleagues have changed and are part of the change when they appreciate that with radical collaborations model with co-creations models working with different actors, we are achieving results that in the classical mode of activity or reaction are not possible. Thank you Carlos this is this is brilliant we are getting closer to the end and there's another question that has been repeated both in the chat and in the question and it's that of the collaboration across countries so developing universities working with developed countries is specifically how it's framed. I just want to say that SDSM has been set up precisely to that to try to promote these kind of changes, exchanges, but I would want to open the floor to see if any one of you has any specific experience that you want to give to our audience. Well I'm happy to kick off there so one interesting impact of COVID has been the increased role for our collaborators in Indonesia in a joint project on that we're working on there. And potentially I think for the researchers from the global south having a greater role as in future we might see you know less travel between countries and less of researchers from northern, you know the global north sort of flying in and flying out of countries. So I think that's an interesting perspective and we have, we have a program, which we're doing jointly with a number of universities in Indonesia to provide nature based water and sanitation in informal settlements. And now that is having to be managed by the local community. Although it's still a joint project with our Australian and US and Canadian researchers. So I think, you know we can probably learn from this experience that there are real opportunities for greater involvement from developing countries in a lot of this research. Wonderful. I'm afraid that we're going to have to almost end here because we need to end the session at the hour so that the next session at ICSD starts. And I want to end by thanking all of the panelists for a very insightful discussion and as John was saying clearly there are almost many more questions than answers so what I want to say to everyone participating is that what we want that is precisely to start asking these questions and refine what are some of the key elements to these questions and if this is a topic that you're interested in please do reach out because we want everyone that wants to be involved involved. And we hope that this group is going to be moving forward in, in, in defining some of these, some of these problems and so you'll hear from us soon. As Stahl mentioned there are three sessions that are going to be also discussing this topic, including one that starts just right now so these are session nine C seven E and eight E so make sure to to look that up in the program of ICSD. And just very quickly on those questions that weren't answered perhaps because they were quite specific to one participant or on one topic. I've taken note of all of them and we will be contacting our speakers to to to get some, some feedback from them on specific initiatives that you were interested in. Once again thank you everyone for your participation and great discussion and looking forward to the next steps. Oh everyone. Thank you.