 and welcome to Cooper Union, what's happening with human rights around the world. It's an honor today to welcome two amazing advocates and educators as we look at Hawaii joining the global education, Ohana and education for sustainable development now. What's so exciting is United Nations University, regional centers of expertise, Hawaii was just designated as the newest member of the global movement of education for sustainable development. The Ubuntu committee in Tokyo designated Hawaii on International Human Rights Day recognizing the contribution of Hawaii, both popular and traditional education for UN sustainable development goals. What's so exciting though, is on International Day of Education, Hawaii got the great news. We're here joined with two educators who are gonna share with us today, what is a UNU or United Nations University regional center of expertise and more importantly, more about education and sustainable development. Brittany, Brian, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you so much, Josh. Brittany, can you share a little bit about education in general, why it's so crucial and important and also about sustainable development and how those two come together under this exciting global initiatives? Exactly, yes. So ESD education for sustainable development allows all of us to acquire the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that are necessary to help give us this very sustainable future. It also requires participatory teaching, which is something at our UN location, especially Brian and I engage in, which is mostly focused on conflict prevention and creative problem solving. And what's nice about ESD is it really empowers learners to change their behavior and take action for sustainable development. It can include things such as critical thinking, imagining a brighter future and making decisions in a very collaborative way. What's also nice about education for sustainable development is that sustainable development can encompass a variety of different things. We can think of sustainable development in terms of natural resources. You can think of it in terms of maybe sustaining our education, having a consistent quality education and making sure that the same is given for all. But ESD can really relate to all of our 17 sustainable development goals. And that's something that Brian and I are constantly working on at our RCE location. And we're really happy that you now have an RCE location and we can partner up and do things as well. Thank you so much, Brian. Would you like to add to that about education for sustainable development? Yeah, the America's network, which is central, south and North America. And by the way, congratulations for being the number nine US RCE in the family. What we do is we gather information, we learn from one another. So there might be indigenous ingenuity going on in central and South America that is not only sustainable, but it's been going on for thousands of years and something that we may have been doing a long time ago, but have forgotten. So people share these ideas. And the nice thing about creativity and whatnot is it doesn't have to be high tech. The simplest solutions to the most complex problems are typically the ones you should go to first. And oftentimes we forget to do that. So ESD is saying, hey, guys, there's actually some elegant ways to approach our future. And the other thing about ESDs is you know the network in Hawaii. So you've got a lot of resources that you're disposing. Well, now you've got the entire world because there's about 180 locations worldwide. So when we think about the future and we're going into scenario building or forecasting and back casting and all the other stuff looking at futures, we can see how different parts of the world are looking at their futures and then our global future. And it's nice to see that there's a lot of common ground. It's like these concentric circles. And what we're trying to do is find where the common ground is and build it out, build it out, build it out. It's fun. It's fun, it's a big picture. That's a great point. And exactly, that was actually the focus for UNURC Hawaii Moana Nuiakea. We were creating a deeper culture dedicated to sustain sustainability with the nature at the center of our island philosophy policies and practices to protect our common future. And we're thinking of it as a haupu u fern growing in our beautiful islands. And haupu is the indigenous white tree fern native to our lands. And it's threatened species found mainly on Moko Keave on Hawaii Island around the Hawaii Volcano National Park. But that haupu u fern illustrates intersection of our ideas, initiatives and institutions. And that was the entire point, too, rooted in indigenous intuition. And so I'm really glad you brought that up, Brian. That's a really excellent point. And when we look at the sustainable development goals, I think it's something most people don't know. I mean, if we look at them, it's number one, ending poverty. Number two, zero hunger. Three, good health and well-being. Four, quality education, especially I know we all love 4.7 on global. Five, gender equality and gender justice. Six, clean water and sanitation. Seven, renewable energy. Eight, decent work and economic growth. Nine, innovation and infrastructure. And 10, reducing inequalities and inequity, where I'll dedicate to that. But then 11 is exciting with that sustainable communities and cities. As well as 12, our own personal behavior, right? Responsible consumption and production. And then for Hawaii, as well as for everyone these days, climate action. 13, 14 is life below water and 15 is life on land. 16, peace, justice, strong institutions. And 17 is exactly the essence of UNURC is that partnerships are able to forge together. Can you maybe explain a little bit about how the SDGs came about and which UN agencies maybe are really focusing on education and sustainability and have that global mandate? Because most people think of the UN as this monolith building right there in New York, but there's so many UN agencies dedicated to so many different aspects. Brittany? The SDGs were developed at our UN conference on sustainable development. This was a conference that was actually held in Rio in 2012. It also leads from our millennium development goals that we had prior. And the purpose of these goals were essentially to create a set of global goals that relate to the environment. They relate to political challenges, but also economic challenges that we face as an entirety for all of humanity. And what's interesting about the United Nations is that we have these goals. And whether or not you wanna see them setting ourselves up for failure, but it's very progressive thinking and it's taking care of the world. And it's something that creates world leaders. It creates Nobel Peace Prize laureates. It helps expand our United Nations as well. A lot of people, like Joshua said, they think of, when they think of the UN, they think of UN headquarters in New York, but they don't realize that there's so many different levels of the United Nations, especially they can be within nonprofits, they can be found within universities. We have various organs of the United Nations. We have UNITAR, UNICEF, UNESCO, and even a lot of these organs that exist or organizations I would call them more so, a lot of them have different things embedded within them. Like UNITAR has Seafall and Seafall and UNITAR, even though they talk together, they operate very differently. Can you scream the acronym for some? Cause I know we run around in the UN world and most people are like, what is UNITAR? Is that something I wear with my Lulu lemons? It sounds like, yes. So UNITAR is United Nations Institute for Training and Research. We also have UNDP, United Nations Development Program. There's so many out there. And then we also have these RCE locations, as you know, which are regional centers of expertise. Thank you. Some of these UN sustainable goals have been championed by particular people. Brittany, you want to say anything about Charles Hopkins or am I putting you on the spot? No, you go ahead. Well, he's a UNESCO chair and he's been with UN and RCE, gosh, he's been with UNESCO and RCE for quite some time. And his work has led to some of these, well, at least one of the sustainable development goals. So it's not like it just came out of a committee and people sitting behind desks and whatnot, it's people out in the field. And when I think of the UN, there is that stereotype about people desks and in slow bureaucracy and governments and fighting in two-headed monster and New York city and whatnot. But really the UN is people out in small villages and throughout the world doing things, using indigenous ingenuity in the Indians called Jugod, coming up with really crafty solutions. And it reminds me of, if you got some junk in your backyard and you got an idea, you're an inventor. And a lot of the things that lead to people meeting 21st century needs without the advantage of, say some of the first world technology, their ingenuity is what's leading to sustainable development but without all the garbage that goes along with it. So literally they find creative ways to do it. And I think that really should be the face of the UN and the future. What young people figuring out, so for instance, like how do you harvest water in a desert region? And you go out and you realize this technology has been around since before Petra. And how is it they can harvest several hundred gallons of water a night without really doing it? How are several thousand gallons when they're really trying or during the raining season, several million gallons? How do you get 20,000 people to live in a place that gets less than one inch of rain on an annual basis as they figured out to work with nature, not against it. So they dance with nature. And the more we go back to that kind of thinking and we get this sort of creativity going, the more we can see that there's a lot of elegant, simple ways for education for sustainable development to occur. It's not just textbook stuff. It's going out and remembering what our forefathers and mothers may have done before us. We're going to other parts of the world and seeing how it's done and bringing it back home. We should be exporting ingenious ingenuity from other parts of the world, bringing back here in it to kind of simplify things in a sense. I mean, look, no, I'm not trying to poo poo. Some of the advances we've had with being able to grow crops to keep millions of people, hundreds of millions of people alive and nourished. There's been some fantastic advances. I mean, one gentleman is credited with saving several hundred million people in India for his natural breeding technique for wheat in Mexico. That's fantastic. But there's other things we could be doing just to kind of keep it simple. And I think the more we think about that, better off we're going to be. I'm getting kind of old and I see these people come up with these really complex protocols and stuff. It's kind of like, is there just a simpler way to do it? Yeah, and if it's simpler, more people can repeat it or modify it. You make something so incredibly complex. It's going to be hard to do. It's going to be hard to teach. It's going to be hard to transmit. I totally agree. And that gets to really, something that Brittany got back to, I really thought what was revolutionary about the global goals was first and foremost, it said, leave no one behind. I thought that was absolutely crucial. Also then, heard this behind first, but then what was also a shift, right? From the millennium development goals to the global goals, it wasn't cutting it in half. It was old enough to say, we'll eliminate it from the planet. And then I really do appreciate, Brian, all the examples you're giving because when we do think about it, it is more peer to peer. And just people talking story is probably more transformational than that more complex larger systems that we've worked in in the past where we hire consultants and do everything. What I'm excited about the UNURCE, Hawaii Moana Nuiakea, is that network of knowledge and being able to exchange and being able to then focus what you were saying, that dance. We started to do that dance for dignity, but also dance for democracy. And in this case, it's Earth democracy as Bandana and Ashiba talked about it and how we can do that. Maybe you could continue with highlights of various UNURCE activities and ingenuity in the Americas as well as around the world building on the one example you shared earlier. Can I give you one real quick that I love it when people just come up with brilliant ideas and we'll give you some specific RCE stuff in the Americas, but there's a young researcher at Stanford University who was looking at, it's a medical engineer. How is it that we can get, so this is one of the access to healthcare as one of the SGDs and how do we make it universal and affordable and approachable and that sort of thing. And what this guy did, well, there's two inventions. One is you need to have a circuit to use, like an oaky daughter where you can spin blood into serum and stuff like that to be able to do some hematology analysis. Well, what they did is they get a little piece of paper that puts a drop of blood on it and it's got two strings. You pull it like this and it spins. It's kind of like a kid's toy. Like when I was a kid, I had something I don't know what it's called. And then what it does is it separates the blood out and then you can take it, put it on a slide and do your analysis. It's kind of like for 50 cents. So you don't have an $800 microscope and you don't have to worry about power supply. That's one thing. And then another thing that this guy came up with for less than a dollar, he built a microscope and it comes on a piece of paper and you can pull it out and you can have a assemble it and it's got a little piece of glass in there to amplify or to for you to be able to look at the sample and visually verify, oh, this is, you know, we've got malaria here or we've got something going on. And it's almost as ingenious as like some of these water purifies, you know, the straws you can use to drink, have potable water. All that kind of stuff saves lives. And it's no use doing anything else if people are dying on us from diseases that are easily preventable. And by doing these things, by coming up with a $1.28 microscope and a $0.58 blood tranche, blood, whatever it's called, the yoke data, the thing that's blood, that is ingenious. And guess what, it's being exported and it was developed in the field. And they taught people and the people, the field say, hey, this is how you should modify it. This is the way it's gonna work. That's, and the networks for doing something like that, the networks of democracy for doing stuff like that is UNU RCE locations. And there's a ton of them in India, by the way. And there's overabundance, I should say, which is good in India and in Africa. And what we in the Americas can be doing is linking up with those folks and seeing some of this crazy cool stuff that's going on. Yeah. Thank you so much. Brittany, is there anything you'd like to add about examples of UNU RCE in the Americas and how we can interact better? So I can comment on, before I came over here to Salisbury and put in an application for an RCE location with Brian, I came from RCE, Greater Atlanta and I really enjoyed working with them and their director Jenny taught me the ropes of RCEs and she kind of inspired, she inspired me to put in an application over here. And what I like about Jenny's location is, you know, they work on a variety of education for sustainable development initiatives, especially focused on environmental reasons. But she also takes, she approaches the sustainable development goals from a viewpoint of equity and justice. And that viewpoint really builds upon Atlanta's history as being home to the civil rights movement. And I think it's very inspiring because she's created like this new regional model for collective impact over there. And she has incorporated and really developed a large youth network over there as well. And let's see here, another example could even be over here, our RCE location that Brian and I have, we also take a similar approach. We not only focus on environmental issues, but if there's a certain like social justice issue as well, we'll work on a project with some of our fellows, especially if it involves the Gandhi family. So I don't know if Brian wants to share a little bit about Dr. Arun Gandhi, if we have time. Yeah, it doesn't hurt to have a guru. Arun Gandhi is Mahatma Gandhi's fifth grandchild. He just happens to be like the senior practitioner in the Boston Center where the RCE is located. And Arun takes ideas, he calls himself a peace farmer and does things one at a time. Yeah, yeah, and he's been at it for, he'll be 88 in April. So a good eight decades, he learned from his grandfather firsthand. And what we'll do is we'll start things maybe like with seasonal farm workers on the peninsula here and the state legislature and try and find ways that we need people to work in agriculture, but at the same time, there's measures of dignity and where do people, children get their education. So how does it, how is it reciprocal? How's it balanced? How is there sort of an equity aspect to these sorts of things? But we also work on rural health, which if you think about it, United States, but it seems kind of odd. We've got the world's best health system, especially when it comes to different technologies and all that sort of stuff. But if you look at the even distribution of diseases and whatnot, it doesn't exist. And there's a rural aspect to it. There's a geographic aspect in a class and a racial aspect to these things and that there's very specific rural health needs that aren't being met by the, it's not a major agenda item, I should say, on United States health agenda. And so we kind of bring these things up and it's shedding light on issues in finding local solutions. And so we've had some very good success over the years. One of the people that works with us in the center, she's a fellow, her name is Mitzi Perdue. She produced farms, produced chickens, very intelligent, bright lady. And she started an organization called Healthy U of Delmarva to address specific issues of health and rural communities. And it really shed a lot of lights to the point where Johns Hopkins University Medical School said, there's something to this and we should spend some more time and get over here on the peninsula and take a look at it. So there's all sorts of crazy ways to do it. Another one I wanna bring up is, there are, every year we have two conferences. One is the America's Conference where all the locations get together and we spend a great deal of time. Basically show and tell. And these really interesting projects that folks are doing. It could be young college students in Mexico. It could be people in Canada coming with different agriculture things, stuff on water. You name it. And it's really inspiring because again, they're showing us some of the best stuff, some of the best work they're doing and over a two day period, you realize there's an incredible amount of good stuff going but it's like one seed at a time. Well, that's great. And I like the idea of peace farming as well. And maybe we could share and Brittany, you can add as well the examples, but then also how's the calendar then for people around the world to try and engage with this? Is it, when does the America's meeting happen? When does the global one happen? And then the exciting part of follow up. I'll take it, Brittany. Sure, okay. The America's meeting of which Brian was just referring to includes representatives from RCE locations. It's normally the RCE secretariats or thoroughness directors. And they'll come to these meetings and the first one, which is the regional one is the America's meeting and that usually is around October. The reason why these are made at certain times usually is due to other conferences or something that's going on at UNESCO. And then we have a global one which usually meets, I would say in December of each year too. But not every year we've had these meetings or conferences. There's been some years where it's been skipped. They range from being in person and also online, but it's a great opportunity where RCEs can come together from all over the world and share what projects they're working on and network. And just basically, also, actually I have no idea what I was gonna say there. I'm like Dory the fish from Finding Nemo, but anyway, yeah, it's an incredible opportunity where you get to go and meet everybody from all over the world. So we're very fortunate the RCE service center which supports our RCEs, helps us bring everyone together and takes care of getting us there. Well, we all know with COVID, it's been extremely challenging of course to continue meetings to have those sessions. But one of the things that we were thinking about was for UNURC Hawaii Wana Nuiakea, we're so excited to join this global network of fellow activists, advocates, analysts and artists, of course, and we thought about it in Africa from Cairo, Egypt to Quasunatal, South Africa and in Europe from Vienna, Austria to Scotland, United Kingdom. We can really reach out and share skills around the UN Paris Agreement. And as you were describing in the Americas from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Georgetown University, United States of America in the Asia Pacific from Tasmania, Australia all the way to Waikato University and Altero in New Zealand, we can connect on strategies to achieve this UN 2030 agenda of these 17 global goals. So it is exciting as Brian shared for talking story, but it's also exciting to see and learn from each other because in a way we're all sort of peace farmers and we're looking for the right seeds that we know will go with our soil, that we can plant and we know where we're from but we also see the commonality of some of those challenges and what I think also that's exciting about UNURC that would be great for us to both delve into in our final moments is maybe how it's also traditional education but also popular education outside the classroom and how really the world is our classroom with UNURC. Right. Hey, most of the good stuff that we see going on with these RCE networks is experiential in nature. It's getting your hands dirty. It's kind of interesting you would talk about the right seeds for the right soil because what might be a solution here is not a solution in Uruguay. And so they have to come up with their own solution and those parts of the Middle East where they said, oh, the desert cell bloom. And what they did is they literally took plants and trees that were found in Europe and tried to plant them in a desert. No, that's not the way it works. And then as I was saying a little while ago, we have to dance with nature rather than work with it rather than not. I think the 2030 number, the goals for 2030, it won't be achieved, but it's not supposed to be. But we had to put a number on it somewhere. It's got to be relatively within reach. But these are lifetime and multi-generational questions and solutions and we just get better. And it's a Bayesian kind of thing. It's not like, oh, we found a solution and go on. We just get better and make some adjustments and get better again and get better, better, better, better. And so it's, I think we should really reinforce that it's like an iterative process, something that we're gonna be continuing to do for a good long time. And that's why relationships like the ones we're forging here are most important. Because you know, what goes on in Hawaii, we don't know, but we're gonna learn and maybe there's something really funky, creative, cool you guys are doing that we can pick up and do over here. That sounds great. Brittany, any closing comments? I have to say that RCEs make it feel like we're all part of a global family. And ever since you've been introduced as an RCE, Josh, you've even come closer to us, I feel like. Even though you're all the way in Hawaii, so. No, UNU, RCE, Hawaii, Moana, New York, we consider it also a multicultural, multidisciplinary movement dedicated to sustainable development, rooted in collective dignity and human rights for all. And we're hoping we can contribute by bringing together both thinkers, transformative beauty builders in an inter-island and intergenerational hub for sharing these promising practices to promote rights and protect our planet. And Brian, it's definitely aspirational, but I think it's like human rights. What we're saying about the global goals, it's a floorboard that no one's life should fall below, but also the heaven and the aspiration we aspire towards. And together we can achieve that only by partnering and it all begins with education. Yeah, and you know what? We can match those aspirations with achievable expectations, institutional expectations, those sorts of things. I think one of the things we can't do is kill passion, because young people come up with great ideas and passions just fuel. And I've learned at my age that when they're passionate about something, just get out of the way, they're gonna run you over. But we can't find every solution tomorrow. We could work on it in stepwise progression. So I guess maybe the western there is the patience that goes along with good conversation, good action will eventually lead to something and not perush what we're doing. It's a deliberative process somewhere in it together. Thank you so much. And that's actually the three P's I teach on my students versus passion. And that's a renewable fuel. Then it's patience, because things just don't happen as quick as we wanted to. And we always remember though, as youth gotta be yesterday, and then finally persistence. So those are the three P's I always share. So it's great we're on the same page. I know we're running out of time, but I wanna thank you on, I think Brian we wanna have one more P. I don't wanna leave out. Perseverance. There you go. That goes with passion, persistence, perseverance. There we go. Thank you so much, both of you for joining us and look forward to being part of the UNU RCO HANA, Malahia Makeapona. Thanks Josh. Welcome to the gang. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste.