Students in the Munk One program presented their intervention proposals last Thursday, offering innovative ideas and solutions to help meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Five teams presented in a Dragon’s Den pitch format in front of a panel of distinguished experts consisting of Yaprak Baltacioglu (Chancellor of Carleton), Rahul Bhardwaj (CEO and President of Institute of Corporate Directors), Ron Fonberg (Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, and former Deputy Minister of National Defence), and Elizabeth McIsaac (President of Maytree).  

The event was a culmination of eight months worth of work for the students, who had spent the first semester learning about research methods and the second semester exploring a problem within their assigned SDG and developing a solution. “There’s an entire year of build up to this,” Dr. Teresa Kramarz, Director of the Munk One program, noted in the event’s opening remarks. The time commitment, however, paid off. In delivering final comments on behalf of the panel, Rahul Bhardwaj remarked on the high quality of all the presentations. “They were well-presented, well-structured, and you had great responses to our questions,” he said, “Each group taught us something about their issue.”

The winning proposal addressed the over-representation of Indigenous people within federal prisons in Manitoba as a means of working towards SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. The group’s proposed initiative, entitled GladU, called for the development of a training program for Gladue report writers in Manitoba along with a monitoring mechanism that tracked the use of Gladue reports in the province. GladU’s aim is to advocate for and advance the mainstream use of Gladue reports in Manitoba when dealing with the conviction of any Indigenous person.

Other project proposals included the development of an aquaponics-centred co-op in Puerto Rico to improve food security; targeted and contextualized outreach to schools with low vaccination rates in Toronto to improve the city’s herd immunity; a teaching resource repository that provides multicultural educational supplements to teachers in order to decrease bullying of Latino kids in California; and a documentary about the Gaspésie caribou that encourages civic activism in response to the caribou’s rapidly declining population.

The winning group will be looking to expand on their idea and further engage with key stakeholders about their proposal in the coming months.