On the topic of sustainable partnerships this week, I came across this article by Sustainable Brands which talks about this new partnership between companies such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Unilever. What this partnership is aiming to do is to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals set out by the United Nations. These goals include breakthrough innovation, the accurate valuation of nature, engaging employees, etc. Dubbed Paragon Partnerships, the companies want to come together on a quarterly basis for discussion and to tackle key issues surrounding the environment.

My personal thoughts on this are that it does sound very interesting and promising.  What Paragon is trying to do is utilize their network and resources as a joint unit in order to address sustainability and development challenges. They want to raise key questions and uncover troubling statistics and then decide what their action plan should be, and then release this information to the public so that everyone can chime in and help.

The process on how this works is that research will be conducted by the companies, NGOs, and government partners, and then they will post their findings online which people can access, and then decide how they can take action in order to help achieve these goals.

Some of the companies and organizations involved with Paragon Partnerships

In terms of what these goals actually are and who created them, the goals were created by the United Nations, and they want to tackle key issues such as gender equality, quality education, clean water and sanitation, climate action, etc. Check them out at http://www.globalgoals.org/.

Browsing through their website and some of their social media channels, I was initially impressed with what I saw. It seems like this is something that the United Nations have given a lot of thought about and they even have celebrities such as Ed Sheeran and Leonardo di Caprio chiming in.

Your boy Leonardo urging people to take action against climate change

In the future, I’ll be interested to see if this partnership can produce any tangible results. I am a bit skeptical whenever these big companies come together to achieve lofty goals, like achieve X by this certain year. Therefore, I will be curious to see the impact that this partnership has within the next year or five years or so. Achieving all of these goals by 2030 does sound a bit ambitious, but it is good to see these companies taking action and I’m definitely going to do more research on these global goals and see what I could do to help achieve them.

Feel free to watch this video as well giving you a brief rundown over The Global Goals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpqVmvMCmp0