Improving Engagement of Interns and Employers with the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals

There is growing focus on graduating global citizens who can advocate for and operationalize sustainable futures by advancing the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With the high volume of internships the University of Waterloo facilitates, there was need to better understand how these internships might be contributing to the SDGs in deeper, more meaningful ways. The researchers conducted a pilot study to classify a sample of international internships in terms of their impact on one or more of the 17 SDGs (Ivkovic et al., 2020). A key outcome of the study is that there is need to build greater awareness of the SDGs and better assess actual impact on the SDGs. This paper explains the design and development of a low-resource activity, based on a guided-conversation exploration instrument for interns and organizations to recognize how their roles could contribute to advancing the SDGs.