From ‘Grand Societal Challenge’ Frameworks to the structure of your Challenge for this Bootcamp

<aside> ℹ️ The aim of every How to Change the World Learning Journey is to empower and prepare you – the students in the bootcamp – to bring your skills and knowledge to bear on whatever ‘Grand Societal Challenges’ you are motivated to tackle, across whatever local contexts you hope to work! Ahead of reading this resource, we encourage you to review Appendix 1 of the Bootcamp Outline & Schedule which details the Expanded General Learning Outcomes for this bootcamp.

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<aside> 🗺️ An introduction to ‘Grand Societal Challenge’ Frameworks

Given that you registered for this bootcamp*,* you likely already appreciate that communities and societies in your home country and around the world are facing a long list of daunting, complex challenges with entangled social, economic, environmental and technological dimensions.

Over the last few decades ‘Grand Societal Challenge’ frameworks have come into widespread use as tools for capturing and communicating such complex challenges — and often the related opportunities — in structured ways. The aim of nearly all of these frameworks is to mobilise diverse stakeholders to work on those issues together. Sometimes these frameworks are deployed simply as high-level mobilising stories; other times they are used to mobilise and steer significant financial and/or political resources. Today, a wide range of organisations — from national governments and international organisations, to non-profits and philanthropies, to even Fortune 500 companies and investment banking — have created or adopted many such frameworks.

Every How to Change the World program focuses on Challenges that are grounded in and explained in terms of one or more 'Grand Societal Challenge' framework. For this program, our Challenges are grounded in one widely and globally used Grand Societal Challenge framework: the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). More information about the The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is provided in another resource in this section.

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<aside> 🗺️ The structure of our How to Change the World Challenges

Every How to Change the World Learning Journey begins with a Challenge that couples one (or more) Grand Societal Challenge framing(s) with a focused geographic Challenge Context. The purpose of this approach is to enable participants — you — to engage and explore the human and social complexities that go along with trying to address such Grand Societal Challenges in complex, real-world conditions… which in turn enables us to introduce you to approaches and tools for tackling those complexities with both humility and confidence.

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