“I was fortunately one of the luckier students. Who is exposed to the Sustainable Development Goals starting in middle school?” asks Prishaa Shrimali. She is now a sophomore at Marymount School of New York, but was first introduced to the SDGs in 5th grade. Her first project? Creating a poster related to SDG 6: clean water and sanitation. Since then, she has been engaged with several independent, non-academic affiliated projects related to the Goals. Among these projects is a poetry chapbook she created called “The Global Goals: In Verse,” which combines statistics and poetry to educate younger audiences on sustainable development. She’ll be presenting this project at the International Conference on Sustainable Development (ICSD) 2024 in September. 

Prishaa is part of the graduating class of 2030, which is also the deadline to achieve the Global Goals. She has already been tapped by the Columbia University Center for Sustainable Development and Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens to help develop an instrumental toolkit key to SDG 4: Quality Education. To break down this project in ways other students can understand, she’s centered her research around a set of questions, like: “What is global citizenship education? How can we implement global citizenship education in school environments? What student-led activities can we do … and how can we engage different subjects for each student?” 

An intersectional toolkit like this not only has potential to reach a larger audience, but also to reach students across disciplines in politics, science, justice, and more. “It’s kind of a global community in a sense, because you’re incorporating students of all interests, and I find that really powerful,” Prishaa said. At the same time, it can provide people an entry point to global issues. 

Prishaa hopes that even after the 2030 deadline for the SDGs, we can meaningfully include more nonprofit organizations aligned with specific indicators under the Global Goals. She is optimistic for the future because as she puts it, her generation is not only “very outspoken,” but “we definitely are not afraid to voice our opinions on certain things.”

— Dynahlee Padilla-Vasquez, United Nations Foundation